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"Less was at stake in these elections than many outsiders assumed, however, since the Iranian presidency is weak and most important policy is set by Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei..."
Wait just a cotton pickin' minute! I've heard from the right for the last two or three years (at least) that Iranian President Ahmadinejad is some sort of power hungry madman intent on getting the bomb, attacking Israel (if not perhaps even the United States) and just generally a modern day dictator wielding nigh on ultimate control of Iran's vast military ambitions* and foreign policy. And now someone is gonna try and tell me that the real control in this fundamentalist religious state is in the hands of their fundamentalist religious leader? How can that be? How can so many of our talking heads have been so wrong? I guess the adage "It must be true 'cause I saw it on Tee Vee" is in need of serious examination.
Seriously though, I have no real idea if the Iranian presidential election was stolen or otherwise subject to widespread fraud/maniupulation. I do know that I don't hold much trust for anything I see reported in the US media these days.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out in advance of the start of the war but they went largely ignored by our media. Recently, Faux Newz threw its media support behind the very-small-by-comparison public tea bagging demonstrations and made them seem much bigger than they were. In the 2001 inauguaration, many thousands of protesters lined Pennsylvania Avenue to give voice to their displeasure of seeing G.W. Bush installed into office following the shutdown of the Florida vote count by the USSC and those protesters were effectively disappeared by our news media. So now, when there are protests in Iran following this election, I have no way of judging whether their numbers are up there with the public tea-baggers and are being played up because that's the way the desired narrative goes, or if there are in fact massive protests being objectively reported.
I hope there was no fraud in the Iranian election, or that if there was that it wasn't enough to swing the election. The mere clumsiness of committing fraud to the point that Ahmadinejad would receive around two thirds of the vote in an election our media had reported as being nip and tuck in the final days leads me to be at least somewhat skeptical. But that said, since it appears that regardless of what I've heard from various talking heads on the Tee Vee these last years the fact is that the Supreme Leader in Iran is an Ayatollah and not the president of Iran, does it all really matter that much?
*For those that might misunderstand, that was sarcasm. I don't know that Iran has much in the way of vast military ambitions, especially as compared to the world's one remaining superpower.
