So a Senator on the job for less than three months gets seasoned GOP senators, forty-seven of them to be exact, to sign a letter to Iran’s leadership basically saying that whatever agreement they reach as a result of the negotiations with the United States, France, England, China, Germany, and Russia that would prevent it from getting a nuclear bomb could be undone depending on who succeeds President Obama in office.

They told Iran that negotiating with us would be a waste of time.

After negative reactions from the American people, most of the news media (except FOX, of course), and Democratic and Republican Representatives and Senators, the best excuse that could be offered for signing the letter was that the majority of signers hadn’t really read it because they were in a hurry to get out of Washington before snow started falling. Apparently that was a better way to handle the letter than holding off until they came back to town three days later and could discuss it.

This, especially as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, was one of seven Senate Republicans who did not to sign the letter. That should have told the 46 signers that there could be a problem with it.

Buyer’s remorse has set in.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who signed the letter, has said the letter “probably would have been better just to have it be an open letter addressed to no one.”

Senator Pat Roberts, who also signed the letter, has now stated that because he thinks “the message is more important than who we send it to”, I might have been better if it “could have been addressed to other folks and gotten the message out”.

Jeff Flake of Arizona said, “I just didn’t feel that it was appropriate or productive at this point” when he refused to sign it.

While the seven Republicans who didn’t sign the letter criticized it, like Susan Collins of Maine who believed whatever opinion the GOP had should have been directed to the president not the leader of a foreign country, editorial boards of newspapers that had endorsed some of the letter’s signers during elections, expressed their objections.

Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer that had endorsed Senator Rob Portman during his 2010 campaign wrote, “The magnitude of this disgraceful decision shows the degree to which partisanship has gobbled up rationality on foreign policy.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer, that also endorsed Portman, said the letter “diminishes the dignity of the Senate by disparaging the president and presenting an amateur lesson on U.S. governance.” The paper sees Portman’s signature as a potential difficulty when he is up for re-election.

In New Hampshire, The Telegraph of Nashua, that in 2010 had endorsed Senator Kelly Ayotte, a favorite of the Tea Party and conservative talk radio,  did not agree with her signing the letter saying, “One wonders how loud and angry the Republican response would have been if a petty clan of Democratic senators had written an open letter to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev” during nuclear arms talks.
There no two thoughts that this buy cheap levitra will not work properly. Amazingly, uk tadalafil http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/02/breaking-tornado-warning-issued-for-aiken-burke-richmond-barnwell-counties/ was not produced while using the sole objective of treating erectile dysfunction; instead, the concept for developing the drug is always to treat a heart ailment called angina pectoris. A viagra online free noted history of one or more vomiting episodes each week is what characterizes functional vomiting as a chronic disorder. This ED medication is able to inhibit the PED5 enzyme, which allows the cGMP enzyme to work to make your penis canadian pharmacies viagra bigger & thicker.
The Peoria Journal Star wrote, “Our expectations were higher of Kirk”, referring to Illinois Senator Mark Kirk whom they had endorsed in 2010.

These were the Senators elected in that big we’ll-show-Obama Tea Party upset in 2010, and those who endorsed them may be seeing where they went wrong with that.

Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, called the rush to sign the letter without discussion a “true scandal”. He wrote, “It was signed by some members rushing off the Senate floor to catch airplanes”. He noted that there had been “no consultation with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, who has studiously followed the nuclear talks.”

Even Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee of Utah have been criticized by the Salt Lake Tribune which has backed them.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who had been an aide to both Daddy Bush and Baby Bush feels the letter could contribute to a world that will be more uncertain, dangerous, and disorderly.

Former Republican governor of New York, George Pataki, said, “Just imagine if, come 2017, there’s a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. … Would Republican senators want a Democratic Senate sending a letter to a country when the president is engaged in negotiations? I don’t think so.”

The mystery of why senators with years of experience, boasted Constitutional expertise, and what was thought to be knowledge of foreign policies and treaty making procedures deepened when Senator Cotton went on Face the Nation this past Sunday to defend his letter.

When Bob Schieffer asked the senator, “What do you want to happen here? What is your alternative here? Let’s say that the deal falls through, then what?”, the senator exposed his ignorance of reality when he replied, “Well as Prime Minister Netanyahu said, the alternative to a bad deal is a better deal. The Iranians frequently bluff to walk away from the table. If they bluff this week, call their bluff. The Congress stands ready to impose much more severe sanctions. Moreover we have to stand up to Iran’s attempts to drive for regional dominance. They already control Tehran. Increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana’a as well. They do all that without a nuclear weapon. Imagine what they would do with a nuclear weapon.”

What he seems not to realize is that Iran did not take over control of Tehran like ISIS has been taking over cities in Iraq, but Tehran is the capital of Iran.

Although Senator Cotton believes the United States should increase sanctions on Iran, what he also fails to understand is that the other countries involved in the negotiations have been informed by the open letter that they could be schtuped by the United States in favor of what Netanyahu wants, so they might very well decide to ignore U.S. sanctions and fill the void by supplying Iran with what we deny them.

And to be the butt of Iranian jokes?

Come on.