Kerry ignores Americans held by Iran in his crazy push to get a lousy deal with Iran

As you all surely know, Team Obama just negotiated one of the worst deals of all time with Iran.  The House Foreign Affairs Committee found the deal...curious in the extreme, and asked Obama's hand-picked secretary of state John Kerry to drop by and answer some questions about it, as part of their responsibility to oversee the operation of our government.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith asked Kerry if, during negotiations that would end up giving a huge benefit to Iran, he'd raised the issue of the fate of two Americans being held captive by Iran.

Kerry replied,

We have not linked [the issue of the captive Americans] directly to the nuclear issue because we believe that prejudices them [apparently the Iranians??], and also prejudices the negotiations [sic]— we don’t want them to become the hostages or pawns of a process that then gets played against something they [Iranians?] want with respect to the nuclear program.

Wait...what??  You don't want the American captives to become "hostages or pawns"?  Dude, the Iranians were trying to get $5 Billion in cash released to them, and to get the West to lift all economic sanctions.  They reeally wanted this.  In exchange for this huge benefit they offered to...keep doing what they've been doing all along--enriching uranium.  Of course the reason the sanctions had been imposed in the first place was to get Iran to *stop* doing that.

Your "deal" 1) released their Billions in cash; 2) lifted most of the sanctions and 3) explicitly permits them to keep enriching uranium.  You gave away everything and got *nothing* of substance in return.

Because the *Iranians* wanted this deal so much, you could easily have made our only substantive demand ("keep doing what you're doing" is NOT a substantive demand) that they release the two or three Americans they're holding.  And yet you say shit like "We don't want [the Americans] to *become* hostages..." 

Dude, here's a flash for ya:  They already *are* hostages.

John Kerry strikes me as a dangerous moron-- dangerous because he *looks* polished and speaks in a pleasant voice, which leads people to believe he's smart.  But as his quote above shows, he's just another slick, self-aggrandizing con-man.  Can't imagine how any competent president would hand-pick someone this incompetent to be secretary of state. 

Wait...

A bit of background for my student readers:  In 2004 Kerry ran for president.  One of the points he and the Democrat party pushed hardest was his military record, including that he'd served in VietNam.  This was a huge contrast to the usual military-hating Democrat candidate, and many thought he had a good chance of winning.  But on closer inspection it turned out he'd only been in Nam for 3 months or so and had requested (and got) an early return to the States because he'd allegedly been wounded in combat 3 times.

Closer investigation turned up testimony from veterans who'd served with him that all three of his "wounds" were scratches.  Conservative reporters asked him why, if he was telling the truth, he didn't just settle the issue by asking the military to release his records?  Kerry was indignant:  How dare anyone question his statements!  But he refused to release his military records. 

As the public opinion began to harden that he'd lied about his record he *solemnly promised* that after the election was over he'd release his military records.

Virtually no one believed he would--and in case you're charmingly naive I'll end the mystery:  He never has.

After Kerry returned to the U.S. from his highly abbreviated VietNam assignment he wrote that he threw his military medals over the White House fence to protest the war.  Confronted with that statement during the campaign, and seeing that confirming the story would cost him the vote of almost everyone who'd served or had a relative who had, Kerry changed his story:  He said he'd thrown medals over the fence all right, but they weren't *his* medals.

Hey, that changes everything, dude.  Cuz for a second there we were startin' to think you weren't quite as gung-ho as your current campaign rhetoric was claiming.

Why anyone would believe anything Kerry says today is a mystery.  The guy's a slick con.  Like Obama, reality to Kerry is whatever he needs it to be at the moment to get past an uncomfortable question.