Liberals have been attacking Senator Tom Cotton and the other 46 Republican Senators for telling Iran that a bad deal with Obama will last no longer than Obama is in office.

Liberals have begun using the Cuban Missile Crisis as an analogy:

"I cannot imagine the Congress of the United States writing a letter to Khrushchev in the midst of those discussions and saying, ‘Don’t worry about this guy Kennedy, he doesn’t speak for our country,’” said Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent, harkening back to the tense Cuban missile crisis showdown between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “And yet that essentially is what took place (Monday).

While the Cuban Missile Crisis is a good analogy, liberals are getting it all wrong; the reality is that the Cuban Missile Crisis shows why the Senate letter to Iran was not only good but morally necessary.

Because President Kennedy is an enshrined saint of modern liberalism, what he actually thought must be supressed; liberals have forgetten that he was a very hawkish Hawk.

By todays standards President Kennedy would be a conservative Republican if not a Tea Party Patriot -- Kennedy opposed abortion, pushed through a tax cut, and authorized the invasion of Cuba as well as our involvement in Vietnam.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was working hard, at the risk of nuclear war, to prevent Soviet nuclear weapons being placed in Cuba. He knew what a threat that would be to America. Kennedy had America’s interests at heart.

Given that, it would have been horrible for Senate Republicans to have sent a message to Khrushchev telling him that any deal made by President Kennedy that prevented Soviet nuclear missiles from being stationed in Cuba would not last a minute past the time when Kennedy left office.

But the recent letter from the Senate to Iran is based on the well-founded belief that President Obama is willing to make a deal that will provide Iran with a path to getting nuclear weapons; the equivalent of Kennedy agreeing to let the Soviets base nuclear missiles in Cuba -- remember, Iran is working to develop an ICBM. 

Unlike President Kennedy, President Obama apparently does not think nuclear weapons in the hands of our adversaries is a bad thing, or perhaps he thinks that the Iranian mullahs are just kidding when they refer to the U.S. as the “Great Satan”.

The correct analogy would then be that if during the Cuban Missile Crisis it became clear that President Kennedy was going to let the Soviets keep their nuclear missiles in Cuba where they would put tens of millions of Americans at risk, a group of senators wrote a letter to Khrushchev telling him that any such deal struck by Kennedy would be, at best, a temporary respite. 

The point is that if the president is seeking to protect American from a nuclear threat, Senate involvement would be bad, but if the president is in fact working to achieve an agreement that would lessen the security of America and expose Americans to nuclear attack, the Senate has a moral responsibility to speak out.

Another correct analogy that helps make that clear would be that the Senate had sent Khrushchev a letter during the Cuban Missile Crisis saying that they were 100% behind Kennedy and his demand that Soviet nuclear missiles not be stationed in Cuba and that when the Soviets heard Kennedy they heard America.

That analogy is interesting because it underlines how we know that Obama is not trying to prevent Iran from getting the atom bomb. If Obama were, the Senate letter would be a great negotiating tool for Obama. He could turn to the Iranians and say “Look I know you’re nice folk but the reality is without an ironclad agreement those Senate Republicans will ensure we get no agreement at all and the sanctions will go on forever”. That would force the Islamofascist rulers of Iran to either accept continued, and increasing, sanctions or agree to something that would prevent them from getting nuclear weapons.

We can tell that Obama is not interested in keeping Iran from getting the atom bomb from the fact that instead of welcoming the Senate’s letter for giving him more leverage in the negotiations Obama is upset by it. Obama’s reaction tells us without any doubt that Obama knows that the Senate, Republican and Democrat, will not like the deal he’s cooking up.  That in turn tells us that the deal will give the Iranians the ability to get the atom bomb, if not now then in the not too distant future.

Given that Obama has tacitly admitted that the agreement he’s working on is one that the Senate will not support, it’s clear that the Cotton letter had to be written to remind the Iranian dictators that they are not negotiating with an all-powerful ruler but rather with a lame duck president whose bad decisions could be erased the minute he leaves office. 

Liberals are right that the Cuban Missile Crisis is a great analogy for the current situation but their lack of historical knowledge, a constant problem for liberals, means that they don’t realize that the correct analogy shows why the Senate’s action was not only good but in fact necessary.

You can read more of tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious and feel free to follow him on Twitter