Yesterday, I was was reminded about the existence of Scott Ritter — through a bit of a fuzzy route: a link to an item of economic hysteria at a website called “truthdig”, which apparently employs Scott Ritter to do some “truth telling” or other (shown prominently on their top of the page banner).  Scott Ritter was, circa 1998 and 1999, a hero of the “right” because he hawkishly  denounced Bill Clinton’s policy visa vie Inspections in Iraq, and seemed to say Saddam Hussein was harboring vast supplies of chemical and biological weapons.  Come 2002, he became a hero of the “left” as he dovishly denounced George W Bush was lying in saying that Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and leading us into the war in Iraq.  The thing about Scott Ritter that always puzzled me was his dogged insistence that his views were completely consistent — when questioned about this he would answer by the verbal equivalent of stating the two viewpoints with strong force.  (I note too that a quick google search shows Timothy Noah making that same comment here:

he’s argued that his views never changed, despite a substantial paper trail to the contrary

I could always imagine how Scott Ritter might explain, to my satisfaction, the seeming discreprency.  But he didn’t make them.  So I was left with a fairly odd situation with him — a man who was correct about this matter, yet even still had to be taken with a grain of salt.

And so for the past several years I would occasionally hear news from Scott Ritter on one topic: the upcoming war with Iran.  Dates certain.  Strangely, the dates always passed, and I was left with vague intimations of covert actions, somewhere on the edges.

So, upon seeing Scott Ritter’s face, I made the following guess:  he has some things to say about the Iran situation.  And my guess on what those might be: the election results were legitimate, and what we’re seeing in Iran is Western Propaganda and the results of CIA psy-ops projects.  This would allow him to sit himself comfortably in the “neo-cons angling for Showdown in Iran” line of the past few years.

That Seems to be roughly the case, though I may be reading too much into some inferences here and there.  Large chunks of his article I at least think are plausible enough — the only twitter comment that looms large for me from Tehran is the question “Is this Berlin 1989 or Tianamin Square 1989?”.  I don’t think the results on the ground bear out the “distorted picture of the few of Mousavi’s base of college kids distorted picture of the election” line — he’s guilty of that selectivity as he accuses everyone else.  But, for my money, the most problematic bit comes from page two, he rolls out a whole lot of straw with this:

Was there fraud involved in Iran’s presidential election? Almost certainly.  One might argue that the heavy-handed involvement of unelected clerics in determining who gets to run for office in and of itself makes a fraud of the democratic process. A similar argument, however, could be made about the exclusivity of the two-party system in the United States today, and yet very few media pundits question the viability of America’s democratic system of government.

Good thing nobody out there is making the case of Iranisn electoral fraud based on the limitations of their “democractic process” — as it is, this reads like a legitimizing argument through cynicism.  I guess I could say that our analyses tends to be a little bit wobbly on the nature of Mousavi.  If Ritter wanted to provide a “Realist” perspective with Mousavi finding his way to the reign of power as a possibility with a “not much changes” leading to his conclusion that we’re still going to be grappling with Iranian nuclear designs whatever happens — that would be a column that makes more sense to me.

I suppose the matter hinges on his acceptance of the election outcome, which is the key departure to the lousy perspective.  If such happens — Ahmadinejad returns to power — the internal dynamics of the regime won’t be quite the same and the government’s repressive controls will recalibrate.  It’s a different status quo, and it’s worth acknowledging that, or to quote the tactically understating Barack Obama “I do believe something has happened in Iran..”

An overheard bit of conversation:

“You know when you see a dad, and he’s kicking ass in Dadville, and you go ‘Wooah.  I want to be like that guy!'”

Actually, I think I’ll modify that nugget.

When you see a Dad
Who’s Kicking Ass in Dadville
I wanna be him.

That’s more poetic.

I’m not a dad.  I know some dads.  I have a dad.  I may be a bit too myopic to put my place in any dads’ shoes, particularly my own dad with relation to me, to understand what “kicking ass in dad-ville” entails or how it manifests itself.

It’s also possible that the particular language employed by the conversants is a case study in why George Will hates blue jeans.

My immediate assessment of the Washington Post op-ed poll revealing that Ahmadinejad sweep?  Okay, if you take that poll at face value, it would show the electoral trends of what an Ahmadinejad Landslide of that magnitude would look like.  The results that came in from Iran looked nothing like it — the American equivalent of the Iranian election results would include something like McCain winning California.  (The equivalent would be the infamous Dick Morris election projection map detailing an American electorate I don’t recognize.)

I am not an expert on anything, but I basically have no patience for anyone claiming this election as anything short of a Farce.  Something I see in some mainstream news outlets who reported the results with a straight face.  And, in the world of the conspiratorial — here, I lean over to my sidebar outlets of Alex Jones’s “Prison Planet” and “Information Clearing House” — we see what is, for them, a pretty understable diorientation — understandable because they’d like to put this on the vast conspiracy that runs all of our lives, and also need to show a media manipulation of plotting against another nation.   But Information Clearinghouse does us a service with this post. 

So, Andrew Sullivan is the go-to-place for Iranian news coverage.  Not so much because Andrew Sullivan himself is this great Iranian Election Expert — and there are surely more knowledgable commentators to go toward — , but because he’s filling in the role of a Professional Blogger in diligently aggregating a vast supply of media items. 
The Revolution will be Twittered.

The cable news networks displayed their weakness.  Fox News is hard-wired to pump out a steady stream of Identity Conservative Republican propaganda, agenda to the narrow task of defeating the Obama Administration and the Democrats.  MSNBC has gone to counter-programming of liberal commentators, and at any rate apparently can’t get out of a weekend programming of documentaries.  CNN would have been well advised to have recognized the moment and at least flip the switch to their International station for the crucial Friday overnight.

They have steeped themselves in the Washington-based Donkey versus Elephant Game, a money saving and highly profitable entertainment outlet which ordinarily works out well enough.  But in times like these, and on this developing topic, they become useless.  Not least of all because the donkey — elephant game is beside the point — a larger and more meaningful context is needed.

Bill Kristol states it thusly.  Though, here, the problem lies with his sentence:  But he is our president.  Unless he means to extrapulate this to “our” as in to escort him to hamper him to the national realm and not the center of and be all of all International Activity which present itself with many an actor.

Which is to say, 75 percent of an article summarizing the events coming out of The Nation and The Weekly Standard should be roughly identical (not that they will be), in terms of throwing rhetorical support behind the will of the democratic-yearning masses and support in invalidating an invalid election.  Some of the other 25 percent would deviate with, for instance, The Weekly Standard throwing jabs at Jimmy Carter in 1979 and The Nation putting it in the historical context of the 1953 CIA – backed Coup.  After that article, the next article in the two publications would have to differ.

Despite this all, I suspect we’re in for another election cycle full of Republican nomination fighters chanting the name of Ronald Reagan.  There is a simple reason for the Reagan hugging — there is nobody else for the GOP to turn.

Much has changed since the 2008 campaign, when the Republican contenders all were openly competing to be Mr. Reagan’s true heir. In one debate, Fred Thompson invoked Mr. Reagan on tax cuts; Mitt Romney hailed him for championing “our military,’ “our economy” and “our family values”; while John McCain linked “my dear and beloved Ronald Reagan” with his own support for free trade.

In accepting the nomination, Mr. McCain branded Republicans as the party of three heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Mr. Reagan. In this he followed George W. Bush, who in 2004 pointed to Mr. Reagan rather than his own father as the president whose spirit “will always define our party.”

The Republican base being with the South, there is some minor though not entirely insigificant chaffing at the recitation of Lincoln — as seen by anti-Lincoln books blowing through the breeze at Republican dominated Conservative Action Pac meetings.  Theodore Roosevelt is an interesting figure, and I guess the aggressive nationalism is what McCain projects coming out of Roosevelt — though even here, his placement in the “Progressive Era” unsettles what the Republican rank and file desire.

More to the point, Lincoln and Roosevelt exist outside anyone living’s memory.  What presidents exist in the memory from anyone who is alive right now?  On the outer edge, there is Hoover.  Best to be forgotten.  So there’s Eisenhower.  “Caretaker President”, at the end of his presidency left the Republican Party Apparatus unsatisfied.  And then there’s Nixon.  HA!  Ford.  “Caretaker”, again, and wasn’t even ever elected.  Then there’s the two Bushes.  Hence, out of the Cult of the Presidency, they have the Cult of Reagan, and nobody else.

Meanwhile, who the Democrats have?  The biggest “cult” centers around Kennedy — some pretty good marketing coming out of the post-assassination “Camelot” mythologizing — the successful presidential campaigns of Clinton and Obama tapped it and the unsuccessful candidates Dukakis and Kerry tried to tap it.  But Roosevelt (FD) looms large still — even as the “Greatest Generation” that came of age during his administration dies out — and so right off the bat we have great dissipation of Kennedy as any sort of central focus.  Meantime, the other presidents not rendered with the same sort of “charismatic” personal entrancings still manage to tug on the edges for the Democrat’s identity:  Truman was an unpopular president, but his image was quickly refurbished by history.  Johnson was dragged ashunder by Vietnam and offers up a Cautionary Story, and yet signed the Civil Rights Act.  And Carter built houses after his daunting presidency and warned about Oil Dependence during his presidency.
Clinton?  To be determined.

I suspect in the decades to come, Obama will become as big a focal point for the party as Reagan is to the Republicans — somebody needs to replace Kennedy, after all, lest the Democrats get stuck in the current Republican Reagan rut — only worse.

Somewhere after seeing a marching band play Abba’s “Dancing Queen” —

— and the association that comes to mind there is not so much any shade of Queer culture as it is “From the Kingdom of Nye” —

there was a woman waving a sign.  On the front was a circle with a line through it crossing out “DADT”.  Opposition to “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell.”  Good.

There was another message on the back of her sign.  “NO WAR IN IRAQ.”  Good.  An anti-war message in a period of some liberal capitulation to a new, friendlier, administration that is nonetheless continuing wars.  A platform beside the point, though.

This is not so much a contradictory message – well, maybe it is a bit contradictory — at least in terms of prioritizing.
To paraphrase the late local conspiracy theorist Ace Hayes from some public access video I saw a few years back from some speech he gave in 1993: “The big liberal cause of the day is to defend the right of gays to fight for the Oligarchy’s Empire.”

The Ayotallahs of Iran just staged a coup, and everybody knows it, and I suspect the Ayotallahs want everybody in Iran to know it too.  A minor project for me would be to go back to the news releases coming out of Tehran through the US Media (and elsewhere) following the CIA backed coup that took out Mosaddeq in 1953 and compare it with the news and compare it with the official pronouncements coming out of Tehran today.

What gives it away is the ham handed declarations of wide spread support for the leader (Ahmejidad and the dictates of the Islamic Revolution today, the great mass movement of “Royalists” that was manufactured in 1953) and the ham handed declarations against the deposed leader — Mossaddeq is very much saddened by his failures to the people of Iran — or some such is how I remember the NY Times reported it;  today the Ayotallahs and Ahmajinedad have decleared this as a rejection of the moderation found in Mir Hossein Moussavi’s previous tenure, said with a force the suggests they want a finality to that statement.

For the past eight years, as Bush and “the neo-cons” sprouted off about the “Axis of Evil” and the threat from Iran, I put myself neatly into the counter-veiling opinion of “just wait for the coming generation” and the sublimated cultural thrusts they’re bringing.  It’s been a bit difficult for me to suggest that the tremors seen about the blogosphere and on the news add up to anything — either pro or con:  the urban “Green Tide” for Moussavi’s supporters is more technologically advanced the the (ahem) “red-staters” making up Ahmajedid’s base out in the poor rural hinterlands*.  But now it does appear that the “wait for the younger generation” equation has just come to a head, and the power-brokers saw it, saw where even a controlled election result could lead down the line, and clamped it down as quickly as possible.  It’s possible the current scenes in Iran will look like Tiananmen Square in a decade:  a brief interlude of a fight for Democracy, squashed by an Autocratic regime, and then shredded into the memory hole as much as possible.

Unless Langston Hughes’s raisin poem holds.

……………………………..

*Disclaimer.  No, I’m not an expert on Iran’s population.

I have to say, this is the most intriguing bit of spam to show up my comments section (pending approval– denied) to date.:

Tired of a competitor’s site? Hinder the enemy? Fed pioneers or copywriters?

Kill their sites! How? We will help you in this!
Obstructions of any site, portal, shop!

Different types of attacks: Date-attack, Trash, Attack, Attack, etc. Intellectual
You can work on schedule, as well as the simultaneous attack of several sites.

On average the data, ordered the site falls within 5 minutes after the start. As a demonstration of our capabilities, allows screening.

Our prices

24 hours of attack – $ 70
12 hours of the attack – $ 50
1 hour attack – $ 25

Perhaps that recent hacking of this site came after my enemies received this same message?

A google search shows that, of course, everybody and their mother has received this message.  Beware your enemies.

How annoyed should I be to see various conservative pundits and publications chaffe at the term “right wing extremist” and insist that, if anything, he better fits the lines of “left-wing”, as in suggesting his words better fit the profile of an Interational ANSWER protester.  It’s a conceptualization that guarantees any number of mental gymnastics: he’s singing the multi-cultuarlism gospel.  Seriously?
Notice to everyone:  This is not a game of tit for tat.

Iran is the new Florida… and admist that bunch of variations of “hanging chads”

… of course, means that Ahmadinejad “wins”.