Ignoring Iran

CNN aired a repeat of Glenn Beck over the weekend in which he had a great "Real Story" segment. Below is the text of that.

First, welcome to "The Real Story." I want to remind you just a few of the stories that have made big headlines in the media over the last few months. We had the Virginia Tech shootings, we had Imus getting fired, Paris sentenced to prison, Anna Nicole`s baby needed after, Britney shaved her head, went into rehab, then got back out of rehab. Rosie O`Donnell said a bunch of insane things, then quit. David Hasselhoff got hammered and made a video. Alec Baldwin went off on his daughter. Miss USA partied too much. An astronaut went crazy, and Sanjaya was voted off "American Idol."

You know why everybody has spent so many hours infatuated with these stupid stories? It`s because they`re all about celebrities or violence or public embarrassment. And with a few exceptions, the stories themselves weren`t all that important. But what was important is that we kept watching like stupid zombies that we are.

We watch the news because they fed our hunger for entertainment. They played right into the narcissism that we talked about yesterday, the narcissism that is America, unfortunately, today.

Now, I hate to play Mr. Gloomy, you know, and I know I`m not going to set any ratings records for it. But the real story is, while we`re watching all this crap, our enemies aren`t going away. They`re not watching it. They`re not going away, just because we get distracted by the stories like the D.C. madam, which, by the way, was kind of a letdown, wasn`t it? Don`t you think ABC is kicking themselves, going, "What the hell happened to that story?"

Almost two months have passed since the U.N. passed any approved sanctions against Iran. And guess what? They haven`t stopped enriching uranium just because we stopped paying attention. In fact, surprise, the IAEA made a surprise inspection last Sunday and proved that they`re enriching more uranium than ever before.

According to inspectors, about 1,300 centrifuges were actively producing fuel during the inspector, another 600 in some stage of construction and, most frightening of all, a diplomat claims that a total of 8,000 centrifuges could be in place by the end of this year.

Let me put that into perspective, you know, for those of us that don`t have a do-it-yourself centrifuge kit: 3,000 centrifuges operating for one year could make enough nuclear material for you to make a bomb. You do the math on 8,000 of them. Good news is, the current uranium is only enriched to about 5 percent and weapons-grade uranium needs to be enriched about 90 percent. Bad news? Experts say Iran could do that in as little as four months, but there is one small problem.

I`ve been telling you about this for months. You know, we`ve been distracted by Paris Hilton. They have to evict the U.N. inspectors first. That`s the tipping point I told you to watch for. Once that happens, there is no doubt as to Iran`s true intentions and no doubt of what we or Israel will be forced to do to stop them. That is not good news.

The only question is whether we`ll all be too distracted by Lindsay Lohan`s next drinking binge to even notice.