Saturday, June 13, 2009

A Press Dilemma in Iran

Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner in Iran:

Iran declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner Saturday of an election that pitted the conservative establishment against candidate with broad backing from the country's youth.

Riot police attacked opposition supporters, beating them with clubs and smashing cars.

A statement from Mousavi posted on his Web site condemned what he described as the "manipulation" of election results.

Demonstrators wearing the trademark green color of Mir Hossein Mousavi chanted slogans condemning the results that gave 62.6 percent of the vote to Ahmadinejad. Protesters set fire to tires outside the Interior Ministry in the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade.


So how does our press play this to look better for our president's efforts to "restore" our position in the Islamic world through "outreach" and also undermine our efforts to stop Iran's drive for nuclear weapons?

Was the election honest, but the Iranian people rejected our president's recent outreach to the Moslem world by reelecting that loon with a lounge singer look? I mean, one virtual panty-flinging groupie ascribed Christian voting patterns in Lebanon's recent election to the president's Cairo speech. Why are actual Moslems immune?

Or was the voting rigged by the Islamo-fascist nutballs (ignoring that the whole election process is rigged) which demonstrates that we can't really reach out to such a thug regime? If we're supposed to make a grand bargain with the mullahs, doesn't this show that the mullahs aren't trustworthy?

My, that's quite the dilemma.

What will Newsweek do? I mean, other than putting another picture of the president on their cover.