I laughed the other day reading the sports section of the newspaper about the lavish contracts laid out to professional football players, the lowest of which, as I recall, being around $18 million for an annual salary.

You can buy some darned good scotch whiskey with that kind of dough, but what came to mind was the late Senator Everett Dirksen’s famous floor comment: “A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking some real money!”

He would either have laughed out loud in disbelief or raised holy hell if he had known the State Department and President must be so in awe of the government of Iran it could not deny you and your neighbors could pay those Ayatollahs and their buddies $50B big ones via the release of its frozen assets. Iran has between $100B and $150B in offshore accounts that was frozen due to sanctions.

Anyone who had the chutzpah even to question the idea we so had to bribe the Iranians, who have declared the need to kill all Jews and destroy Israel, would be not only tossed aside but accused of trying to find out what we’re really about with all this nonsense!

And you know how the propaganda machine has dealt with Israeli leader Bibi Natanyahu. He was either supposed to remain quiet or not be so damned effective in response because there are politicians who don’t like it if the people they don’t like are too effective while we drop drone bombs here and there and knock off a few civilians including kids because we are entitled to do these things. Right?

And, gee whiz, it only cost us about $800 million to get rid of a murderer named Gadafi in Libya, and all he had done was confess to helping knock out a civilian airliner loaded with innocent passengers!

Oh, we could go on, but the bottom line is you better not have a differing opinion from Barack Obama, or you will pay one way or another. It has nothing to do with whether you’re right wing or left wing, conservative or liberal: you just better hang with the boss…or else.

And that’s where we are today in a deal with one of the most nefarious of governments, the Iranians, who cannot tell the difference between the power of an Ayatollah or an elected president in making deals with the most powerful nations on earth and holding cards we cannot figure out to make all these giants virtually beg for agreement.

So what is going on here and why don’t you know? Worse…why are so few challenging what’s going on? Where are all those allegedly courageous media who could not stop running after a squealer named Snowden? Where are the commentators who have total access to the editorial pages of print and broadcast outlets even merely raising the questions that need raising?

There was another time when circumstances somewhat like these existed and diplomats and ministers went scurrying to make deals with Adolph Hitler to find “peace in our time” and to avoid a war that was bound to come in order to save their own asses. You know what happened.

Only now we have the Secretary of State of the allegedly most powerful nation in the world peddling his boss’s policy with people who openly help to finance a Syrian murderer without blinking.

And you assuredly know all the old axioms about learning from history, which just as assuredly repeats and repeats and repeats.

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Joseph J. Honick is president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash.