The world doesn't need another butcher invading some small country for nothing, leading to the death of up to a million of its inhabitants.

It's kind of hard to have an legitimate election when the Ayatollah has to approve you being able to even RUN for President....

It's kind of hard to have an legitimate election when the Corporate Ayatollahs have to approve you being able to even RUN for President....

And how do we fix that problem? Public funding of elections. It works elsewhere.

The Iranians are going to have to work out their own problems.

Iran is its own country. If they want to execute hundreds of children in public w/o trial for the crime of being gay or ill behaved that's their issue. If they want to stone women to death, fine. If they want to exterminate the Jews, we should support them not criticize them. Nothing could be worse than the false piety of the west and its thousand year history of murdering whomever it wants. In fact Sec Gates said that Iran will be able to threaten the US with nuclear missiles by 2015. I say good! It's about time.

Voting irregularities, religious appeals to the hard right, a busted economy. Spooky, very spooky

_______________________

"How Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is like Amerikan Imperial Presidents" is a more accurate headline, since the status quo referenced in the above-cited phrase is Moving Forward nicely.

And here I thought that his brother's illegal disenfranchisement of 35000 black voters, the illegal butterfly ballots and the questionable halting of the recount (which went on to show that Gore actually won FL) were all rather settled issues demonstrating that Bush did not win in 2000. Also, do we not remember Blackwell, Diebold (and its chairman's promise to deliver Ohio's electoral votes) and the routing of the Ohio voting data through the GOP's servers in TN in 2004? It looks much more like Bush was elected zero times than two times. And let's not forget the uneven distribution of polling booths such that people who live in wealthy neighborhoods have no waiting lines and poor people wait hours to vote. Our elections make those in Cuba look free and fair.

...the Jew loving and dominated US down a peg or 300. At least those of us who are honest have been.

I guess it's my day for disagreeing with you Andrew. The quote says the ballot integrity in rural Iran is questionable, and this is part of the comparison to Bush. So you miss the point by saying Bush was elected twice. The election integrity problems weren't rural, but otherwise the problems were enough for me to deny that Bush was ever elected, even once. He stole both elections. I hope those energetic Iranians in green have more success than blue Americans in dumping our dangerous president.

..but if you've ever watched him in confrontation

(his various interviews with Western media);

He - unlike Bush - has a positive integer defining his IQ.

[I.e..no dummy]

While Ahmadinejad bears a certain resemblance to Dubya Bush (and we can discuss stolen elections separately), what strikes me about many recent elections around the world is that they are all similar in that the urban-based desire for modern change runs up against a solid wall of rural refusal, a refusal usually couched in religious terms. The old does not want to give away to the new, and will do whatever it takes to abort the birth.

Established elites around the world are fighting back, and they are using the huge conservative base in whatever country is currently on the boil, whether the base realizes they are being used or not, to stifle "change." Sometimes they attempt to co-opt the change, take over the movement and turn it to the benefit of the embedded elites, and sometimes they just kill it.

There is far more similarity between Ahmadinejad with his belligerant religiosity and George W. Bush with his belligerant religiosity than either realizes, because both are puppets.

I don't watch Fox programming, but I expect Fox will hasten to explain repeatedly, at length, and with piles of talking points, how the Iranian election was fair and balanced.