James Taranto and others have remarked on the eye-opening effect the Iranian regime’s brutality has had on the Left punditocracy. Ah, now they get it! The mullahs are brutal thugs who share none of our values nor desire for peace. But Taranto correctly notes:

The bad news that Iran is still ruled by a vicious, lunatic regime that not only abuses its own people but threatens Israel with annihilation and the entire region with a nuclear arms race. This is very bad, though it’s news only to regime apologists like [Roger] Cohen–and, as we noted Friday, it would have been true even had challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi prevailed in the vote.

But one wonders what if anything the members of  Obama’s national security team have learned. Have they figured out that there is no deal to be had with a regime of this nature? Does this give them any concern about their self-assurances that we can “contain” a nuclear-armed Iran? Well it should. As Taranto’s colleague Bret Stephens notes:

Now a presidency that’s supposed to be all about hope is suddenly in cynical realpolitik mode — the only “hope” it means to keep alive being a “grand bargain” over Iran’s nuclear program. This never had much chance of success, but at least until Friday’s sham poll it wasn’t flatly at odds with the interests of ordinary Iranians. Not anymore….

Rarely in U.S. history has a foreign policy course been as thoroughly repudiated by events as his approach to Iran in his first months in office. Even Jimmy Carter drew roughly appropriate conclusions about the Iranian regime after the hostages were taken in 1979.

Candidate Obama bashed George W. Bush for not recongnizing soon enough changed realities on the ground in the Iraq war. Will President Obama be blind to changed circumstances in Iran or will he adjust his national security approach? Let’s hope Obama can glance up from his domestic plans to nationalize healthcare  just long enough to realize that strategic calculations underlying his Middle East policy are crumbling. Do you think he has noticed?