Today, Secretary of State John Kerry insulted our collective intelligence by claiming Iran has demonstrated good enough behavior to merit a reduction in sanctions. “Iran deserves the benefits of the [nuclear] agreement they struck, and President Obama has said it, I’ve said, Secretary [Jack] Lew has said it,” Kerry claimed on MSNBC. He added, “It’s fair for Iran to get what it deserves because it has kept its part of the bargain to date with respect to the nuclear agreement.”

This administration sure has a distorted definition of the word “deserve.” Just yesterday, Fox News reported, “The crew of a U.S. Navy ship stopped a massive Iranian arms shipment dead in its tracks, seizing thousands of weapons, AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers that likely were headed to Yemen, the Pentagon announced Monday. The seizure … was the third of its kind in recent weeks, military officials say. Iran has been supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen in their proxy war against a Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States.” Team Obama would argue this is unrelated to the nuclear deal, but that’s missing the point. It continues an alarming trend. More from Fox:

> Last month, Iran announced that it tested missiles marked with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out,” in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution tied to the recent nuclear deal. The resolution forbids Iran from working on its ballistic missile program for eight years and bans sales of its conventional weapons. In January, Iran captured 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Persian Gulf, on the same day President Obama delivered his State of the Union address. Iran released the sailors one day later. Last year, naval forces from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seized a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship and held it for weeks to settle a business dispute. Iranian vessels later surrounded a U.S.-flagged vessel but did not detain it. … In late December, Iran’s military fired rockets near the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, a move the U.S. called “unnecessarily provocative and unsafe.”

Obama criticized Iran on Friday, remarking, “Iran so far has followed the letter of the agreement, but the spirit of the agreement involves Iran also sending signals to the world community and businesses that it is not going to be engaging in a range of provocative actions that are going to scare businesses off.” What was it Obama once said? You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Nevertheless, it appears nothing will stop him from going out of his way to placate Iran.