The Christian Science Monitor notes that “Obama officials are playing cat-and-mouse these days with Iran’s envoys.  The new administration is eager to catch a meeting in any international forum that might lead to one-on-one talks.”  Unseemly, no, the picture of U.S. diplomats chasing Iranians around pining for someone to listen to them?

The Iranian leaders have ignored Obama’s clear overtures, saying on March 20 that “world powers had been persuaded they could not block Iran’s nuclear progress.”  The next day on March 24 “Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei … dismissed President Barack Obama’s New Year’s greeting to the country, delivering Iran’s clearest rebuke so far to Washington’s recent, diplomatic charm offensive.

In a speech to tens of thousands in the Iranian holy city of Masshad, Mr. Khamenei said that despite Mr. Obama’s words, the U.S. hasn’t shown any sign of “genuine” change in its “hostile” policies toward Iran, according to Iran’s state-owned Press TV.”

Michael Rubin brings us yet another instance of rejection.

Those who today recommend the Iranian nation to return to the global order are the exact people who expressed displeasure with advances of the Iranian nation in the direction of the Islamic Revolution… The recommendation to return to the global order is the same thing as capitulating to the bullying powers and accepting the unjust world order. But the Iranian nation has during the past thirty years answered no to this ignorant and illogical demand… All the pressures against the Iranian nation and the regime of the Islamic Republic have only aimed to degrade the elevated position of the spiritual demands of the revolution. Naturally, they did not succeed in this, and they will also not succeed in the future.

Even more to the point.

We tell that you know yourself that you today are in a position of weakness and you can’t achieve anything.

Does that sound like the Iranian Mullahs want to negotiate their nuclear program away?  It doesn’t matter, because the administration’s fawning over the Iranian regime has to do with presuppositions that form a worldview of advocacy.  Rightness and wrongness has nothing to do with it.

It you listen to me long enough, they think, I will be able to convince you to see my point of view and act more in accordance with what I see as reasonable at this particular moment.  But reason is in the eyes of the beholder.  The deliverance of reason, tests for truth, analysis of consistency, and so on, are fundamentally different in the thought systems of the West and the radical Mullahs, and even more different between both and the Ivy League educated elitists.  The administration will keep chasing them until they understand the fundamental flaw in their thinking, which probably means that they will not cease the unseemly displays.