Can you two please get over your American self loathing long enough to not dismiss what might be the end of one of the few democratic nations in the middle east?

Did Iran ever meet our definition of democratic? Hell no. Clerics choosing who was allowed to run, religious police, the Ayatollah really running the show, etc. And they certainly haven't been a friend of ours for justifiable reasons. But they were a helluva lot closer to an actual democratic and open society than just about anyone else in the region. And they were slowly making strides closer.

And all that just might have ended today. So get over your navel gazing.

You can be sceptical all you want. Just cut it with hashing up what happened thirty plus years ago, sixty plus years ago, and twenty years ago in a different country entirely.

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that America is going to intervene or having anything to do with Iran whatsoever until this all plays out. You can forget about intervention of any kind. It would be total suicide for America to have anything to do with this situation. The only way America could do anything there and not have the entire middle east, if not the whole world, come after us, is if Ahmadenijad starts eating babies on live television while wiping his ass with the Koran.

I think his basic premise is flawed because to get a similar graph from our last election, he has to selectively pick which states report the results in what order. If I remember from reading it he went alphabetically. Arbitrary, fine, but it's not how results in any other country are tallied, because nobody has an electoral college except antiquated us. Everywhere else, the votes are basically counted all as one.

Now for his argument to hold up, he would have to show the same chart is made with how the votes actually came in on election night. Not even state by state, the pure raw numbers. Otherwise, any graph could be made by switching around the states.

Just my take on what he said.

You again bring up something that happened over twenty years ago in an entirely different country? Seriously?

Perhaps you forgot about the hostages they took last time there was an American presence in Iran. We don't even have a embassy there. We have to go through the Canadians and the Swedes any time we need to deal with them. And if there really was American funded dissidents in the hills of Iran, Ahmadenijad wouldn't ever shut up about it.

And I hate to point this out to you, but Afghanistan is, in fact, an entirely different country than Iran. Its what that whole having a border between the two and different colored passports is all about. And practically the same is meaningless. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? They're both brown?

Tell you what: try that logic with the next Iranian you meet. Tell him or her they're practically an Afghani. See what happens.

I've never said shit that went down in the last century or so has no bearing. But 'Charlie Wilson's War' has little or nothing to do with Iran today, and what is going on tonight. She was using that as an example of American intervention or invention of these international crisis. While that may have been the case quite a lot in the past, that is not going on here, because we have no presence in the nation of Iran, and haven't ever since they took our embassy workers hostage. That was my point.

I read it. What's your point? Covert non lethal methods? Going after Republican Guard secret bank accounts? We do more covert actions against England and France than that.

Gee. They share a language. So do Mexico and Spain.

Oh that's right, they share a language and a border. Like Scotland and England. Tell a Scotsman he's English. Now there's a mistake I'd love to see you make.

It's not valid because that is not happening here. The US has no hand in anything going on in Iran right now. We have had no influence in Iran in thirty years. Do you really think that any opposition party in Iran could possibly get away with being funded by us, or be supported by us in any way? Again, Ahmadinejad would never shut up about it, and people would get lynched.

No, this is one of those occasions when world events are happening without any involvement by us navel gazing ethnocentric Americans.

Its pretty egotistical and narrow minded of you to think that nothing in the world happens without your ever powerful government somewhere pulling the strings.

If Ahmadinejad comes out on top of all this, I think Obama should insist from now on that he wants to open discussions with the Ayatollah, not Ahmadinejad. I think he should disregard the puppet President completely. He shouldn't say directly that Ahmadinejad is a puppet and as the leader of the United States, he will not talk with subbordinates of the real leader of Iran, but he should make the implication fairly clear.

There's no threat. I'd just like to see you put your absurd notions of people to the test. As matter of fact, all those Afghani friends of yours, next time you chat with one of them, tell them flatly that you don't see any difference between any of them and an Iranian. See, that's not a threat; its just an absurdly stupid thing for you to say. It doesn't matter if you don't think there is a difference. There IS a difference, and every Iranian and every Afghani you will ever meet in your life would be happy to explain that to you, if you were so ignorant as to ask them.