Dictators: For maximum MSM credibility, never claim more than 65% of the vote
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the candidate most in sync with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is, won a landslide victory yesterday in a massive voter turnout. There are only a couple of problems with this: this guy was nowhere in the polls two weeks ago, and nobody seemed to have voted. Let’s take a look. First the pictures of empty polling stations, from Regime Change Iran, where plenty can be found:
The NYT reports the official Iranian voter turnout with less questioning than Florida 2000:
Nearly 28 million ballots were cast, or more than 59 percent of Iran’s approximately 47 million eligible voters. In last week’s election, the turnout was close to 63 percent…..
In fairness the Times also correctly notes that in many ways the election is meaningless: “Real power in Iran lies with the country’s clerics and their supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who can overrule elected officials.” Iran Scan expands on this theme:
the true winner is Khamenie himself. He played the game of politics better than anyone could have imagined. He is now the spiritual leader in control of the Presidency; he is the head of Judiciary, in charge of National Radio and TV and is the commander in Chief of the armed forces. In a nutshell, Iran is once again on the verge of falling into yet another dictatorship.
The Economist notes the oddity of the voting but refrains from drawing conclusions:
the margin of victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the second round of Iran’s presidential election, on Friday June 25th, was striking. Mr Ahmadinejad, the mayor of the capital, Tehran, and a hardline religious conservative, garnered around 62% of the vote, despite having gone almost unnoticed in the field of seven candidates who had contested the first round of voting, a week earlier.
And finally some context regarding how awful Iran is today, also from the Economist, before we put this all together for you:
Though poor and jobless Iranians have been drawn to Mr Ahmadinejad by his pledges to combat poverty, he seems the last person to bring about the opening-up of Iran’s sickly, state-controlled economy that is needed. Unemployment is officially at 11%, though the true figure may be almost twice as high. Inflation is 14%, with the prices of some basic necessities soaring. For an idea of where statist Iran has gone wrong, just look at liberalising Turkey, its big rival to the north-west, which has greatly overtaken Iran in national income per head since the Islamic Revolution. Freeing Iranians’ entrepreneurial spirit and making it easier for foreign firms to invest in the country’s colossal oil reserves would do more to improve the lot of its citizens than building nuclear bombs.
Conclusion
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be the cat’s pajamas of dictators, smarter by far than Saddam or Little Kim. The MSM dutifully reported Saddam’s 99.5% victory as a real election, but 62% for a virtual non-entity in the race is much more nuanced. Of course we understand that, given the stature of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei couldn’t pull off Saddam-like numbers, just a nice decisive mandate — for an unknown, a puppet, in an election in which the word-of-mouth is that few voted. However, while it is pretty easy to fool the MSM, the dreadful conditions of Iran’s economy and the discontent of the vast majority of Iranians is a little bit harder to mask. Nonetheless, Khamenei knows how to work the MSM:
Look at the coverage. The election in Iran looks for all the world as legitimate as the EU Constitution referendum in France. Then consider this:
A recent public opinion survey of Iranians, conducted by The Tarrance Group, surprisingly found that a vast majority (74%) of Iranians feel America’s presence in the Middle East will increase the probability of democracy in their own country. The survey, which was the first of its kind, found two-thirds of Iranians believe that regime change in Iraq has been a positive for both neighboring countries: with 66% believing that it served Iran’s national interests, while 65% believed the Iraqi people will, in the long-run, be better off.
Commissioned by the Iran Institute for Democracy, the survey discovered that a solid majority (65%) of Iranian adults consider fundamental change in Iran’s system of government, especially its Constitution, a must to bring freedom and more opportunities to their homeland.
When is a fraud not a fraud? To the MSM, the answer is: when it is done by authentic tyrants.
UPDATE
Here’s an alleged picture of the new President of Iran from 1979. Who knows if such a thing is true? Funny we didn’t see that in Le Monde (HT: LGF). Former hostage Chuck Scott added details:
“He was the security chief, supposedly,” Scott said. “When he found out Akbar had let us out of our cells at all, he chewed out Akbar. I speak Farsi. He said, `These guys are dogs they’re pigs, they’re animals. They don’t deserve to be let out of their cells.’”
UPDATE II
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hasn’t changed his tune in all these years, only become more dangerous:
“Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world,” he said. “The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.”