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Looks like some would-be presidential candidates didn't get the message about Iran:

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that the agreement "makes a nuclear Iran more, not less, likely," and called the deal "a blow to our allies in the region who are already concerned about America's commitment to their security and it sends the wrong message to the Iranian people, who continue to suffer under the repressive rule of their leaders who have only their own self-preservation in mind."

Bad Marco Rubio, R-Fla.! Bad! That's not the accepted line on the Worst Regime in History! Can you help him out, Dr. Krauthammer?

Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for which the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet Communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.

For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”

It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife, and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.

See? If Iran's leaders "have only their own self-preservation in mind," then .... um, deterrence works, and we can't have a war with them this week after all. Bad Marco! Bad!

Now that nuclear weapons and their intercontinental delivery capacity are old enough for Social Security, we've begun to learn a fair amount about them. For one, they aren't used very often.* Some states that could build them have declined. Some states that have built them have given them up. (Imagine the vapors over at Fox News if the African National Congress had inherited half a dozen warheads.) Nuclear states can get into pretty intense disputes without resorting to nuclear weapons. One thing we have no evidence for is any association between eschatological beliefs and the willingness to bring them on through the use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. More than a few of Sen. Rubio's potential rivals for the 2016 nomination might have some explaining to do if that was the case.

Otherwise, Fox has a pretty good front page to start the day with. There's another Project Veritas is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex tale! The "EPA Power Grab" story, with its awesome "That's what" lede, is back! And Fox demonstrates again that it can't tell the difference between the Stars and Bars and the Confederate battle flag. What a holiday week we have in store.

* Lots of us think that's a Good Thing.
** Memo to high school students everywhere. If you want to show that you've "researched the flag's history and didn't find it offensive," don't follow up like this: "The flag means basically more independence, less government. It didn't mean racism, it didn't mean slavery, it didn't mean any of that. It basically meant what they were fighting for was their right to be independent and not have the government control them."