NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' pissing and moaning over the sailors and prisoners released from Iranian custody. This is such a clear-cut case of conservatives trying to portray an undeniable Obama accomplishment as something shameful that I'm surprised more hasn't been written about it.

Source-wise this was a embarrassment of riches, accent on embarrassment. Take Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag. He sucks in general ("Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," 2013) but when the cause is extra hopeless his propaganda gets extra foamy. After one long snarl ("Iran isn't even bothering to threaten Obama. It just slaps him around") failed to disgorge his Obama rage, Greenfield wrote a post called "IRAN IS TRAINING OBAMA LIKE A DOG," using not, as you'd expect, a metaphor about Iranian masters Pavlovizing a drooling Obama, but one in which the dog controls the master:

What Obama has going on with Iran isn't mutual. It's a relationship in which Iran's ‘moderates’ show that Western governments can be trained to give them what they want or they'll make a mess on the floor by taking hostages or blatantly violating nuclear protocols... 

Iran knows how to use diplomacy, but its intentions are not diplomatic. So instead it's using diplomacy to train Obama and his European allies to dispense more treats even as it continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program. 

And the most pathetic part of this is that Obama and the Europeans have been trained to treat every payout like a victory.

Yee-eah, so Iran is like a dog that cheats to get treats... except they're still a dog and Obama's still the master. Concise analysis. Maybe Greenfield had a longer version in which the Iranian dog attacks Obama because its brain got too big for its skull from all those treats, but someone at FrontPageMag decided to edit for a change.

Anyway, have a look at the column. Some good ones there too.