#Why Biden will restart Iran deal and other commentary

Foreign desk: Why Biden Will Restart Iran Deal

Joe Biden “will move quickly to lift sanctions” against Tehran, predicts Lee Smith at Tablet, so the suspended nuke deal can be “completed.” That deal “was never about the Middle East,” which opposed it, but part of an American “worldview” President Barack Obama expounds in his latest memoir. For Obama-ians, America is a place “without borders,” where “Big Tech oligarchs, social-media warriors and powerful bureaucrats join hands.” The deal “is a central component of that”: Empowering a regime that’s “anti-American at its core” will help bring the real, nation-state America “to heel, so it can be transformed into the America” Obama envisions.

Media watch: Paul Krugman’s ‘Easy Paycheck’

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman complained that Joe Biden will “be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy,” prompting The Spectator’s pseudonymous Cockburn to wonder if Krugman even reads his own columns. The Timesman in 2016 called President Trump’s victory “illegitimate in important ways” and the result of a “tainted election,” as he “won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law ­enforcement.” Others who called Trump “illegitimate” include Hillary Clinton, Rep. John Lewis and a host of pundits. All of which shows Krugman is a “lazy writer who just says whatever goes to get an easy paycheck.”

From the right: Dems’ Vaccine Fearmongering

That two COVID-19 vaccines are ready for FDA approval “is a rebuke to the cynical fearmongering that liberals pushed surrounding vaccine ­development in the run-up to the election,” argue the editors at the Washington Examiner. Of those spreading the “absurd theory” that President Trump would force the release of an untested vaccine, “no one was more irresponsible than Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,” who suggested ­experts would have no say in testing and raised doubts about vaccine safety — deceptions “meant to scare up votes and downplay legitimate progress on the vaccine front.” Now Democrats will “attempt to memory-hole their reckless and baseless fearmongering from the fall. But we should not forget it, because it speaks to their cynicism and their character as leaders.”

From the left: A True Swamp Creature

At his Substack blog, Glenn Greenwald seethes at Joe Biden’s choice for Office of Management and Budget director, Neera Tanden — “a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary DC swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence.” What has riled up both right and left is “Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and president of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress”: Among other things, she allegedly punched a CAP staffer after he dared ask Hillary Clinton about her support for the Iraq War; spent the last four years pumping toxic conspiracy theories about “collusion”; and viciously attacked Bernie Sanders and his supporters. “Her face serves as an undeniable and unavoidable reminder of what the Biden administration and the Democratic Party really are. She illuminates the truth about their real aims.”

Libertarian: Powell’s Mythical Massive Fraud

“I’m going to release the Kraken,” former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell ­vowed last month, recalls Reason’s Jacob Sullum, who notes she meant “overwhelming evidence that supposedly would validate her claim” of massive fraud in last month’s election. In fact, her “lawsuits challenging the election results in Michigan and Georgia” are “at least as hideous as the beast of legend and equally mythical,” with “the same sort of dubious evidence that has failed to impress courts across the country.” Her Michigan lawsuit, for one, alleges “the unlawful counting, or manufacturing, of hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious ballots” — but her evidence “overlaps a lot with affidavits” already submitted in a rejected suit that a judge found were “not credible,” “based on misunderstandings, offered unsubstantiated suspicions or failed to make specific, checkable allegations.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board