This came out of a conversation with fellow cartoonist Matt Bors about how Americans who sat on their asses when Bush stole the election(s) are applauding Iranians who take to the streets in the same situation.
If Iranians Were Like Us
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Orange Revolution, Ukraine; Pink Revolution, Kyrgyzstan; Rose Revolution, Georgia
The area is a hot bed of democratic revolution. Of course, it's because the ruling clique use the government's powers alone to command instead of a more sly operation practiced here.
In the USA, we have Fox News (they helped and are helping Obama with all their "he's foreign-born-Mohammedan-communist" stories), we have non-governmental controllers (like credit slavery, 20 million frightened illegal aliens, unchecked right-wing terrorists), and we have a phony two-party system (even Iran has run-off elections). No wonder only half the citizens come out to vote.
whatever
Ted, what I don't get about this oft-circulated fable is this. Al Gore requested the court's involvement. Bush won the electoral vote. Gore even had a constitutional clause allowing him to cherrypick the counties he wanted for recounts.
OTH, Obama grabbed no election majority when you measure in the tremendous anti-Bush sympathy; the media's campaign bias of trampling some Pols while protecting The One from his own past and essentially letting us learn about Obama after 2009, a conscious strategy to avoid journalistic duty for an unprecedented attempt to sway an election. The coverup worked.
Don't forget to acknowledge the verified donation fraud: Disabled credit-card codes, fake names like Doodad Pro and Mickey Mouse and overseas money routed thru bundlers. This past November? Should've been a Reagan-style landslide. But whatever you come up with, close to half of those at the polls did NOT vote for Obama.
Also, for totally unacceptable fraud don't even begin to excuse ACORN or what the New Black Panthers did in Philly.
I could see why Gore supporters were pissed, but the dude got his day in court. He just didn't cross the finish line. Suddenly, ethics are of no concern in what essentially turned out to be a bloodless coup – all funded by Soros and designed to get Obama much more than 52% in what should've been a landslide year.
Bush-haters (or Obamabots) need some consistency on this issue.
The Iranian election was not stolen as cleanly. The American elections were neck-and-neck, making it appear plausible that it was simply extremely close. Essentially, the powers that be in Iran aren't very good at it. They portrayed an Ahmadinejad landslide, which enough people knew was bunk.
For countries where democracy is old, like the US, the theft of that democracy is far more sophisticated. In a lot of ways, the Iranian election system is a lot more legitimate than the American system, making it very difficult to truly jack an election. They screwed up in jacking this one.
I have pointed this out to people ever since the Iranian people started filling the streets. Generally I am called "a traitor" for this. The other response is "it's not the same thing!".
Anon 1:26, I don't even know what to say, you sound like a complete nutjob.
I would like to add here, that I think Persia is a beautiful place and Persians are beautiful people. I think they have demonstrated that they have a lively and pluralistic political culture, even if it doesn't follow an identical pattern to western governments. People throughout the world aren't actually all that different, we just conceptualize differences for a variety of reasons. Americans exploit and repress themselves more than anything. American political culture is its own secret police.
Gore didn't fight for his election. Moussavi is. That's one difference between the two.
If Gore had contested the phony results and taken to the streets, about half the country might have risen up.
we have Fox News (they helped and are helping Obama with all their "he's foreign-born-Mohammedan-communist" stories)
Can you point to one FNC news or opinion personality that is doing this and provide some specific examples? Because we have Obama and HRC, both on record telling Bill O'Rielly that FNC is very fair to them
So let's see, when Bush won, it was a stolen election, however when the Statists Democrats took back the legislative and executive branch, those were fair elections.
Obama did some good at least by apologizing to Iran for the Shah.
I'm sorry, but he should let this lie. If he does anything to force a 'regime change' he commits the same crime he apologized for for the USA years back.
The people threw off the Shah, they can throw off the Mullahs on their own too. There's no "Pope" in Islam, a mullah only has power others give him. If the USA stops being "Great Satan" and tells Israel to "Live with your neighbors, we won't bail you out anymore" they'll have nothing to base their power upon.
I haven't seen a single thread of evidence that the Iranian elections were stolen. This is just a continuation of the Western propaganda war against Iran.
A rigorous nationwide public opinion poll was conducted by two American experts three weeks before the vote, and it showed showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. The elections had over 10,000 observers, national and international. Iranians use paper ballots, not electronic voting machines that can easily be tampered with. Also, Ahmadinejad won by a landslide, whereas stolen elections are typically very close, like the 2000 US elections. A voting fraud of this magnitude is simply impossible.
You may or may not like Mr. Ahmadinejad, but he won fair and square.
To Anonymous:
Those are such bullshit claims. The media was never on the side of Obama, they played endlessly clips of Reverend Wright but failed to criticize McCain's nutjob pastors. The media investigated endlessly very thin Obama connections with Ayers and Rezko, but didn't even touch McCain's corruption back in the 80's that affected millions of people or his connections with Phil Gramm who is partially responsible for the economic mess. The media also refused to touch McCain's failures in Vietnam although they gave cover in 2004 to the Swiftboat liars. The media also failed to talk about McCain's treatment of his ex-wife or the dozens of flip-flops, or need I go on?
Then there's the "MesSarah", for someone as stupid and corrupt as her, I'm surprised the media didn't do their duty and spend every hour exposing her. But the toughest question they gave her was, "What type of magazines do you read?" and she couldn't even answer that right! So don't give me that "Obamedia" crap.
And the stuff about ACORN is lies too. The right-wingers spent months bashing the community organization group and it was just one big red herring in an attempt to suppress the minority vote (and it didn't work.) While it was true that some members of ACORN filled out fake voter registration forms and they were sent in, it was ACORN that actually sorted out the fake forms from the real ones. And they had to send in every one of the registration forms even the fake forms by law, but ACORN told the government which ones were fake. That is something you would never hear on the news. ACORN is a heroic organization despite what you hear on the right-wing news.
Also, despite what Gore did to fuck it up after the 2000 election, it doesn't take away from the fact Bush stole it.
Anon 6/18/09- Put down the Fox Kool Aid and step away. You're obviously drunk on the stuff.
Out of all the countries in the world, the left in the US is the most passive. I'm not too proud of it but the GOP should be happy that they are or else they'd be running for their lives. Besides, I don't think the lefties want to act like their blood thirsty right wing counterparts. But that might change real soon.
Anonymous @ 6/18/09 1:26 PM
Ted, what I don't get about this oft-circulated fable is this. Al Gore requested the court's involvement. Bush won the electoral vote. Gore even had a constitutional clause allowing him to cherrypick the counties he wanted for recounts.
Bullshit. Bush specifically wanted certain districts to not be counted and sued for the same in court. Bush wanted areas favoring him to be counted and areas not favoring him to not be counted at all — and that’s, effectively, what he got. He got the same thing in 2004 — many ballots from soldiers in Iraq weren’t counted in the first place, and truckloads of absentee ballots stateside were simply warehoused.
. . .the media's campaign bias of trampling some Pols while protecting The One from his own past and essentially letting us learn about Obama after 2009, a conscious strategy to avoid journalistic duty for an unprecedented attempt to sway an election
Bullshit Part Two. You’re confusing Obama with Bush. Remember the verified, actually factual event where the NYT sat on the spying story before the 2004 election to protect Bush? Remember the mainstream media’s refusal to discuss Bush’s felony AWOL status in the run-up to the 2000 election? Hell, I had to read all the stuff that most people read about Bush in 2002 in a tiny, independent newspaper — and I read all that in September of 2000.
Also, for totally unacceptable fraud don't even begin to excuse ACORN or what the New Black Panthers did in Philly.
Now you’re just an obvious liar throwing out rightwing propaganda — we’ve already heard these storeies debunked. You may as well claim the Elders of Zion are a real threat next. Complete fail.
Aggie Gal said…
So let's see, when Bush won, it was a stolen election, however when the Statists Democrats took back the legislative and executive branch, those were fair elections.
6/19/09 12:25 AM
Republicans are “statist” — they attack civil liberties all the time. But you knew that. And they do cheat in elections, even if they lose — they just aren’t able to cheat enough to swing the election.
And anonymous @ 6/19/09 10 am — we’ll get change once middle-class white people are extroardinarially renditioned and tortured. . . but probably not before, I’m afraid.
"Aggie Gal…."
I love that I have a following of hateful adolescents on someone else's blog.
Anonymous of 6/19/09 10:00 A.M. wrote:
"Out of all the countries in the world, the left in the US is the
most passive"
The left in the US is the most passive because it doesn't exist.
What we have is scattered isolated groups, each cares about and only about its pet issue whether it is gender or sexual orientation or animal rights or civil rights etc etc.
We don't have a national left that has a national headquarter and national newspaper that speak about the the rights of the common folks against the abuses and exploitation by big corporations and big money and can call a nation-wide rallies and demonstrations if the need does arise.
Ted, I think you should do a column showing the differences between our opposition to the suppression of protests in Iran to our support of the suppression of protests in Georgia. (True, fewer people have died in Georgia. However, Georgia has been known to have invaded its neighbors.)
Finally, fraud or other illegalities are far more likely to have made a difference in a close election than in a sweep like Ahmedinejad's. (There are exceptions- see the South Carolina 2000 Republican Presidential Primary for one example. However, TBMK, Ahmedinejad didn't close 1/4 the polling places…)
The parallels between Iran and the US are striking. Even more striking is the censorship of this in the US corporate media.
I think the real problem with the 2000 US election fiasco, that often gets overlooked, was the role of the Supreme Court. In ruling to stop the recounts (and this was in the public statement) the Supreme Court said that their ruling was based on the particulars of the case, and should not be used as precedent in any future cases by any lower courts.
The Supreme Court only exists to interpret law, to decide cases for the purpose of being used as precedent. Any ruling done on a case-by-case basis is remanded to a lower court of appeals (which they have done COUNTLESS times). Given that Florida law had very clear guidelines on how to handle the situation, guidelines which were not in question, the case should have gone back to the Florida Supreme Court, which had already ruled in Gore's favor. The Supreme Court had no grounds taking the case, and said as much themselves.
As for Iran's elections, the US is pitching the same fit we do everytime someone we don't like gets elected. If Mousavi had hijacked the election, we would have said 'the people have spoken, democracy prevailed.' That's why so few countries respect our democracy, and no one really cares when we scream 'fraud.' Until the Iranians overthrow the mullahs, they'll have no real democracy; the fact that they are protesting, I believe, says more about Iranian youth demanding a political voice than about pro-Mousavi sentiments. The election was a sham regardless of who won, and I think it's only a matter of time before the Iranians shake-off the gerontocracy.
When the liberal reformer Khatami won 70% of the vote, nobody in the west protested. And he won twice. When Ahmadinejad won in 2005, and he won by a landslide, nobody protested. So why now. This reeks propaganda.
This whole thing is a reminiscent of 1953, when the CIA funded thugs overthrew democratically elected Mossadegh and put repressive shah in power. But I think Iranians are much smarter now. They know their history, and apart from few rich Teheran students and and shah supporters living in foreign countries, they really like Ahmadinejad. He has done a lot to help poor people in Iran. He has also exposed the corruption of the mullahs so don't think that they all like him. He has a lot of enemies from that quarter.
Mousavi himself is hardly a saint. He is just a puppet of Rafjansani who is a very corrupt man.
I'm thoroughly impressed by the Iranian people. They grew up in a public sphere saturated by state propaganda. Despite that, they still know what's going on. In the U.S. however, where we tolerate dissent and have a free press, things are very different. People here swallow the official story unquestioningly.
Ahmadinejad's election appeared perfectly plausible to me. If 48% of Americans think that being a good American means voting for a trucculent, illiterate jingoist like Palin, then it seems likely that 60% of Iranians would think that being a good Iranian means voting for a trucculent, illiterate jingoist like Ahmadinejad. Instead, the Iranians appear to be able to think for themselves.
There's clear admitted evidence of voter fraud in Iran. The Guardian Counsel actually acknowledged it. So there was a problem with the election, but Western Media is trying to fit this event into an old narrative of revolution between a disenfranchised reform challenger and a hard liner. It's not at all that. Westerners should stop relishing in the drama of political violence in other places (where they don't have to witness blood on the streets) and mind their own business.
Iran has proven itself capable of taking care of itself, and we should leave them alone and stop trying to manipulate events on the ground based on a fantasy that this is a velvet revolution, or that it has anything to do with 1979.
This is just another form of pornography…sex porn (deep throat), torture porn (Saw I-V), poverty porn (slumdog millionaire), revolutionary porn…being a spectator to world events one doesn't understand and pretending that they know what's going on.
"There's clear admitted evidence of voter fraud in Iran. The Guardian Counsel actually acknowledged it."
Let's be specific. The Guardian Council said the there were voting irregularities found in some cities, and that they will investigate them, but those did not effect the outcome of the election. They haven't stated that any fraud took place.
"some cities"….try 50….and that's just what they're fessing up to. Plus, the irregularities are "more total votes cast than eligible voters"…..that's ballot stuffing, that's a major issue.
If you buy their logic for why this doesn't impact the election you are really fooling yourself dude.
But to reiterate my main point. Americans always think everything has to do with them. Maybe Iranians are sick of the lack of transparency in their government. Maybe this is about them and has nothing to do with western ANYTHING. Maybe we should stop acting like Whitey is the center of the universe….huh?
These demonstrations in Iran look
like another one of these "colored"
revolutions that happened lately.!!??
I think also it is the rich and upper middle classes against the rest of the populations.
I don't think the vote was rigged,
but I think the MSM is rigging the news here.
How someone can rig an election by
11 million votes??!!
The election results are consistent with the independent pre-election polls that were conducted just few weeks before the elections. One such poll was jointly commissioned by the BBC and ABC News, and conducted by an independent entity called the Center for Public Opinion of the New America Foundation. The CPO has a reputation of conducting accurate opinion polls, not only in Iran, but across the Muslim world since 2005. The poll showed that Ahmadinejad had a nationwide advantage of two to one over Mousavi. Secondly, fraud this big with paper ballots would require involvement of thousands of election observers: teachers, civil servants, Mousavi supporters, retirees etc. Not very believable. Also, what must be taken into consideration is that last year CIA was given loads of money to foment opposition within Iran, and that Mousavi is very friendly with the grand daddy of the neo-cons, Ledeen.
Regarding the irregularities, why would they even admit it if they were all in it? No, it wouldn't have effected the outcome as this was a land slide victory for Ahmadinejad. We don't know who cheated, if anyone, it might have been pro-Mousavi crowd for all we know so let's wait and see. I have no problem condemning either side if someone presents solid evidence of a fraud, but so far I haven't seen it.