news in the form of good cop bad cop

good

I particularly enjoy the Federalist paper reference "nations, to be more safe, at length become willing to run the risk of being less free". Seeing anyone in the administration that approved illegal and immoral acts in the supposed quest for national security is fine by me.



The bad. I'd been following this for a while and hadn't commented, mostly because my impression was different than the news media with the purported Obama bump going on. It looks more to me like with the general economy in disarray, people around the world are voting by their checkbooks rather than their radical ideological opinions. Americans rejected social conservatives (for the most part), Lebanon rejected Hezbollah, Europe embraced a variety of radicals proposing different solutions to the present crisis than the bulk of incumbents ("far right" isn't quite accurate, but that's what it looks like to Americans), India stayed the course (because they have a pretty good one) and then Iran had "elections".

It looks to me like they rushed out a pre-certified election with a simple blank slate margin. The question is this: is that the actual margin (although it most likely isn't that way all over the country, as their published election results demonstrate), because undoubtedly there is a large contingent of what passes for social conservatives and firebrand foreign policy supporters, just like we have here. And it's something of a question just how populist such ideas are over there. The main points of contact for media and westerners are Iranian intellectuals. Which one could suppose are much like our intellectuals, with a predilection toward democratic processes and some variety of human rights (and more or less opposed to terrorism, violent threats, and holocaust denial). That's not however the bulk of the country, only a significant cross section of it (that we should expect should have carried various districts or regions in an actual election) So of interest over the next couple of days is whether there are widespread demonstrations and possible revolutionary tendencies building up in a nation that was once what passes for a bulwark of democracy in the Middle East (particularly in relation to our allies). Or if it's just a bunch of the educated elite over there that didn't actually have much influence within Iran itself that backed a reformer while the bulk of the country backed the mad man who promised a road to greatness without a map. Sort of like the '04 election here only with an actual candidate opposing the crazy guy.

Best guess, some riots for a few days followed by a restoration to status quo. And we can get some support this way for international sanctions that we wouldn't have had under a basically powerless Mousavi regime.

Update: It looks like the margin was totally faked now. The question remains who might actually have won under an actual national democratic election. But the likelihood of open revolt and riots, given the obviousness of fraud, is much stronger now than my first impression. I still don't believe it will reach a point that the Khamenei theocracy will be toppled, but they will have to do something different than just attempt to suppress their opposition internally given their tendency to at least appear like a legitimate government (rather say DPRK's dictatorship of the Dear Leader).