During his Thursday broadcast, CNN's John Berman rushed to the defense of President Obama, saying that his ransom payment of $400 million to the Iranian regime in exchange for the release of our American hostages was an example of... wait for it... good "diplomacy."

Former Rep. Mike Rogers and The Daily Beast's Kimberly Dozier joined in the panel discussion, but really, what was the point? Berman closed his segment with a declaration that the exchange allowed "both sides" to declare "victory" and that, my friends, is what diplomacy is all about. 

Of Rogers, Berman asked, "We knew that the Iranians were getting money when this deal was struck. So what's the key issue now to you?"

To which Rogers stated the obvious:

"It's dangerous to set this precedent that there will be money exchanged — either through a wink and a nod and a black bag in the dark of the night — for American hostages."

"This may be in violation of our own sanctions rules," Rogers said before adding that, "the judgment on this is God-awful; and I think that's exactly why they did it in the middle of the night, with an unmarked airplane, with foreign currency, to pay off something that, if this were true — that they wanted to do this in a way that was up front about a legal case — you wouldn't have done any of that. You would have done it very open."

Newsbusters provides the video and transcript re-cap: 

Berman then interrupted with his argument that "the President did say it was happening....We did not have the details about the plane...the euros — things like that." He then asked Dozier for her response to Rogers. She agreed that "the problem is the timing," and soon noted that "the fact of the matter is, this $400 million arrived before the hostages were released. So it's even been seized by some members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a — quote/unquote 'ransom payment.' It looks bad." The CNN anchor followed up by continuing his defense of the Obama administration:

BERMAN: ...I hear from...people who say the criticism is unfounded, Kimberly — you know, correlation is not causation. In diplomacy, we have a lot of situations like this, don't we?

DOZIER: Yeah. It's always going to look messy after the fact. Somebody had to blink first. Someone had to do that good faith or that leap of faith — and the U.S. did it with this planeload of cash. Now, the White House spokesman is saying this wasn't ransom. It all depends on where you sit, how you look at it, how you label it. They're really going to have a hard time getting the Republicans to let this one go.

After letting Rogers again criticize the monetary shipment, Berman returned to his diplomatic line of argument: "Isn't the key to diplomacy, Kimberly, that everyone gets to declare victory? I mean, the fact — don't you try to strike a deal, where Iran can say one thing happened; and the United States can say the other thing happened; and everyone can be right — or everyone can be wrong, frankly, all at the same time?" Dozier answered, "Absolutely. And, yes, that's what happened here — until someone disclosed the timing of this deal."

So the panelists meant nothing really to Berman, who declared this abominable ransom payment a victory for all. And we suppose, to the average left-wing sychophant, it was.