Excerpt
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the week’s top news, including the newly reached agreement framework for Iran’s nuclear program and the controversy over Religious Freedom laws and discrimination.
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: (on Iran Agreement) I think the unprecedented, unrestricted inspections are very, very positive. I am very supportive of what I know about the deal so far.
I — the reaction right now and the resistance, which has been quite outspoken in this country, reminds me of a second-term President who negotiated with a brutal regime that had enslaved hundreds of millions of people and killed millions of people. And he had an agreement to cut our nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles by 50 percent unilaterally.
And he came back, Ronald Reagan, from dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev and said — George Will, the great conservative commentator, said this is the day America lost the Cold War. William Buckley’s “National Review” called it Ronald Reagan’s suicide pact. It was roundly roasted.
I happen to believe that you negotiate with your enemies, with your adversaries. And I think — I think, from everything I know at this point, it’s positive. There’s great resistance in this country. Make no mistake about it. Republican candidates for 2016, by emphasizing their opposition to President Obama on anything, but certainly on this, help themselves.
Mark Kirk, the Republican senator from Illinois, has already retired the classless demagoguery award for 2015 and maybe for 2016 as well, when he said, without having even looked at the terms, that this — that Neville Chamberlain got more out of — from Hitler out of Munich than we did.
I am cautiously optimistic and hopeful. I don’t know what the option is, what the alternative is. I think, to bring them in, it’s always better to deal with people than to isolate them. And I don’t do it with my eyes in any way closed to Iran’s evil acts.
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