Democracy begins at home

So the debate continues on whether or not Iran’s presidential election on Friday was rigged.

My guess is that it was — since Iran is a theocracy and the theocrat in chief wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to remain as Iran’s president — but by how much, who knows?

I consider the source when I see news accounts of the likes of hawkish Repugnican John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCainosaurus and hawkish former Bush regime ambassador John “I Am the Walrus” Bolton claiming that of course Iran’s election was stolen. They want Iran wiped off of the map as much as Iranian hardliners want Israel wiped off of the map, so I discount their rantings and ravings.

I found one Politico article titled “Ahmadinejad Won; Get Over It” to be interesting. The authors make a rather compelling argument that Ahmadinejad has much more popular support within Iran that is commonly discussed in the Western media.

My stance, from all of the viewpoints and all of the news stories that I’ve read, is that no one really knows what happened in Iran. Thankfully, the Obama administration, although pressured by the Israel-first lobby and the warhawks and the war profiteers to declare Iran’s election invalid, has taken a fairly balanced approach thus far, declaring that the election results look fishy but that right now all that we Americans can say about the election is that we just don’t know.

But what I find most interesting and frustrating about the discussion of the validity of Iran’s presidential election is that although there were serious concerns among democracy-lovers about presidential election irregularies in the pivotal state of Ohio in November 2004 — so much so that only for the second time in the nation’s history, a U.S. senator (Barbara Boxer) joined a U.S. representative in filing a Congressional objection to the certification of a state’s Electoral College votes — the debacle in Ohio in 2004 was swept under the red, white and blue rug.

And don’t even get me started on the obviously stolen U.S. presidential election of 2000. And if George W. Bush never was elected legitimately in the first place — and he never was — then there is no way that his “re-election” could have had any legitimacy, either.

Americans are all too eager to scream “election fraud!” at Iran — even though Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, comprised the hawkish, unelected Bush regime’s “Axis of Evil,” so it’s not like the U.S. government could be objective about Iran, which it already has declared its enemy — but Americans are not willing to ensure that their elections at home aren’t rigged.  

Democracy begins at home.