Twenty years ago on “Saturday Night Live,” a sketch set in 1947 Hollywood was aired featuring Jon Lovitz as a hardboiled movie-studio chief and the late Phil Hartman as a vain actor. It went something like this:

LOVITZ: I’m lettin ya go, Johnny.

HARTMAN: Tell it to me straight, Harry.

LOVITZ: You’re washed up, I tell ya, you’re through.

HARTMAN: I can take it, Harry, you just lay it on me.

LOVITZ: You stink, Johnny, you’re the worst actor on the lot, you’ll never work in this town again!

HARTMAN: Don’t leave me hangin’ by a thread, I gotta know where I stand!

Today, for about the 300th time in the past three weeks, Iran has let the world know in no uncertain terms that it is not going to assent to the cockamamie scheme dreamed up by some UN dupe to ship its weapons-grade uranium out of the country in exchange for uranium that can be used for peaceful purposes — a plan then sold to the Obama administration, which scarfed it up like the band instruments  peddled to the good people of River City by the conman Harold Hill in The Music Man. And for about the 300th time, the media are reporting the fact breathlessly, as though the 299 other times the Iranians have made it clear they are keeping their uranium for their would-be bomb never happened. You can read this right now, on the website of the New York Times:

Iran’s foreign minister said in remarks reported Wednesday that he opposes sending the country’s enriched uranium abroad under a tentative deal negotiated with the United States and other big powers last month. The foreign minister’s remarks cast further doubt on the deal, which the Obama administration had hoped would defuse a standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told the student news agency ISNA that Iran would consider a simultaneous swap of its nuclear fuel for other uranium. But he told ISNA, “Definitely, Iran will not send its 3.5 percent-enriched fuel out.”

Mr. Mottaki is the highest-ranking Iranian official to openly reject the deal…

By the time, this farce is over, there is sure to be a conversation that goes something like this:

AHMADINEJAD: I tell ya, Barack, there’s no deal.

OBAMA: Give it to me straight, Mahmoud.

AHMADINEJAD: It’s finished, ya get me? It’s through.

OBAMA: Don’t beat around the bush, Mr. President.

AHMADINEJAD: We’re building a bomb, Obama! We’re building a bomb and if you don’t strike our facilities and destroy them we are going to nuclearize the Middle East!

OBAMA: I can take it, Mahmoud! Say what you gotta say!

(Yes, for the record, my beloved wife works at Saturday Night Live. She bears no responsibility for this post.)