That was a little joke my brother and I played on each other. I’d “rack” his nuts, then “I ran.” And vice-versa. Lame now, but for an 11-year it was hysterical, especially if it was my brother doubled-up on the bed and not me. Besides, it helped with our geography.

I recalled this while watching PBS’s recent Frontline report on US-Iranian relations. Boiled down, PBS says that right after 9/11, moderate forces in Iran tried to end antagonism between us and them. But the belligerent, cloddish Bush administration rebuffed them, causing moderates to lose influence, and now we’re locked in a dangerous power struggle.

Most of PBS’s talking heads were current Iranian leaders. After first showing them spouting conspiracy theories that make Dennis Kucinich and Cindy Sheehan seem sane by comparison (such as, we created Al Qaeda as a pretext for war), they were positioned for the rest of the documentary as reasonable, even aggrieved people. If only we had such wise men running our country!

Never once did PBS address the illegitmacy of the theocracy running the Iranian police state. Or the dire condition of its economy under the mismanagement of the clerics. Or that “moderates” in Iran serve at the pleasure of the mullahs.

Fortunately, John Bolton is out with a book. As IBD observes, we’ve had three decades of BS from Iran, going back to Iran-Contra:

“Surrender Is Not an Option,” a new book by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, was released only this week, but a story within its pages is already getting around.

After hearing of the decision to have direct talks with Iran if the regime promises to end its uranium-enrichment activities, Bolton, dining with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a fancy French restaurant, made a point of ordering as his appetizer . . . carrot soup.

Bolton complains that we are deferring to Europe’s dovish diplomats and offering Iran “several boatloads of carrots.” Bolton called this a “disjunction between the goals the president has and the policies he’s pursuing.”

As he points out, “after going on five years of negotiation by the Europeans,” there’s no evidence of “any sign of change in the Iranians’ strategic policy that they’ve been following for close to 20 years, which is to get nuclear weapons.”

A similar “disjunction” happened during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “It’s time to serve notice we won’t hold still for their barbarism,” Douglas Brinkley’s “Reagan Diaries” finds the president writing in January 1985, on the subject of striking back at Iran for Hezbollah’s holding of U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

That September, Reagan recorded, “It seems a man high up in the Iranian govt. believes he can deliver all or part of (seven U.S.) kidnap victims in Lebanon sometime in early Sept.” on a beach in Tripoli. By December, the president had discovered that “the Iranian ‘go between’ . . . turns out to be a devious character. Our plan regarding the hostages is a ‘no go.’ “