The Washington Times reports that President Obama wrote a “let’s get engaged” letter to Iran’s top mullah before the election. As anyone who has been paying attention for the last three decades might have predicted, the “Supreme Leader” ridiculed the gesture.

. . . Which reminds me of a great point made by Caroline Glick (flagged in NRO’s web briefing — and Caroline’s point was also noted by Powerline’s Scott Johnson): What would the American people really think of all this twaddle about engagement with implacable enemies of the United States if we had a responsible media that actually reported on what a five-alarm whack-job Khamenei is:

THE MOST IMPORTANT repercussion of the US media’s propagandistic reporting is that the American public is denied the ability to understand events as they unfold. Take for instance The New York Times’ write-up of Khamenei’s sermon this past Friday in which he effectively declared war on the protesters. As Russell Berman pointed out in the Telos blog on Saturday, the Times’ write-up was misleadingly selective.
The Times did not mention that Khamenei ascribed world events to a Zionist conspiracy which he believes controls the US. It similarly failed to mention his long rant against the US for the FBI’s 1993 raid on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Had the Times – and other major media outlets – properly reported Khamenei’s speech, they would have made clear to their readers that he is not a rational thinker. His view of world events is deeply distorted by his hatreds and prejudices and paranoia.
But then, if Times readers were permitted to know just how demented Khamenei’s views of the world are, they might come to the conclusion that Obama’s intense desire to sit down with him, and his constant pandering to Iran’s “supreme leader” are ill-advised and counterproductive. They might come to the conclusion that it is impossible to achieve a meeting of the minds with a man who calls Americans “morons” and leads his subordinate government officials in chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Israel.”
And if they came to these conclusions, how could Obama be expected to affect anything?

UPDATE: I see that Mark gave the much needed Steyn treatment to the Supreme Leader’s sermon in his Saturday column, here.