Kimberly Strassel comments in the WSJ on the EPA dust-up we discussed the other day, first quoting the global warming skeptic’s boss at the agency telling him to sit down and shut up in his dissent on cap and trade:
“The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision…I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office…With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”…
the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin’s study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — or perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?
And, in another matter, while we’re talking about elements of the carefully crafted but artificial public persona of the President, Jack Cashill is back on the case of whether Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s first book, which we’ve previously discussed:
Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition. Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries…
the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works.”…I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr. West’s analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity…
both authors evoke images of a “boy” riding on the backs of a “water buffalo” and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with “bamboo sticks.” Ayers places his boy in Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia…Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library…Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells “Frantz” as “Franz.”
The water buffalo stories and the parallel libraries and author misspellings are highly suggestive. We’d normally consider it nutty to think that Ayers wrote Obama’s book. However so much of the public Obama seems staged and phony — except his desire to centralize power in himself and his disturbing identification with the world’s nasty authoritarian rulers — that we now wouldn’t be surprised if the allegations are true. Things could become interesting again in America if the press decided to regularly stand up on their hind legs as Chip Reid and Helen Thomas did with Gibbs.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ comments on the arrest of the Honduran President at the order of that country’s Supreme Court, an event called a “coup” by many in the media and politics, including Barack Obama and the leaders of Venezuela and Cuba:
Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.
But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
It should be noted that President Obama, who had little to say in the early days of Iran’s turmoils (and much of that was inappropriate), found his voice immediately in this case.
Reuters: “Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a ‘terrible precedent’ of transition by military force unless it was reversed. ‘We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,’ Obama told reporters.”
Obama’s initial gut reactions to the authoritarians and democrats of the world have become as predictible as they are disturbing.
The NYT has a story on Honduras that makes for an odd read:
Mr. Zelaya, 56, a rancher who often appears in cowboy boots and a western hat, has the support of labor unions and the poor. But he is a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the middle class and the wealthy business community fear he wants to introduce Mr. Chávez’s brand of socialist populism into the country, one of Latin America’s poorest. His term was to end in January.
The Honduran military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the country’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law against “those who had publicly spoken out and acted against the Constitution’s provisions.”
Mr. Zelaya’s ouster capped a showdown with other branches of government over his efforts to lift presidential term limits in a referendum that was to have taken place Sunday. Critics said the vote was part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the Constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.
Early this month, the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional, and Congress followed suit last week. In the last few weeks, supporters and opponents of the president have held competing demonstrations. The prosecutor’s office and the electoral tribunal issued orders for the referendum ballots to be confiscated, but on Thursday, Mr. Zelaya led a group of protesters to an air force base and seized the ballots.
When the army refused to help organize the vote, he fired the armed forces commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and reinstated General Vásquez.
Even the NYT kind of makes it clear which side the US should be on.
Environmentalism is a religion of sorts, and an unreformed religion at that. (Those sorts of believers are capable of endless trouble, as we all know.) Chief among its sins is man-made global warming — allegedly caused by CO2’s teeny-tiny increase — for which America must be punished. No matter that China and India are the major contributors to increases at this point. In the Obama administration, Gaia must be served and dissent is clearly not welcome. HT: Powerline
We understand that all administrations want to speak with a coherent voice, and controlling the bureaucracies is one element of that, but any bill that is (a) a “huge tax” according to Warren Buffett; (b) paradoxically also a “jobs bill” according to Obama; and (c) something that is needed to “save our planet” in Obama’s words deserves full and open debate — not evidence of the crass suppression of opposing views.
You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:
As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…
Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…
No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…
On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).
Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.
More on the folly that is called cap and trade from Bloomberg:
America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.
“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.
The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline
So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.
Iraq is planning to increase oil production substantially, just as Saudi Arabia has been doing. WSJ:
Iraq…intends to auction off oil contracts to foreign companies for the first time since Iraq nationalized its oil industry more than three decades ago…Some 120 companies expressed interest in bidding for the contracts at the June 29 and 30 auction, according to the oil ministry. Thirty-five companies qualified to bid, including Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec. The six oil fields at stake are believed to hold reserves of more than 43 billion barrels…
Just over 20 of Iraq’s roughly 80 known oil fields have been fully or partially developed, and most of its production comes from just three giants, North and South Rumaila and Kirkuk. Because lots of the black gold is considered relatively easy to extract, oil experts estimate that exploration and development in Iraq costs $1.50 to $2.25 a barrel, compared with about $5 in Malaysia or $20 in Canada…
Iraq is thought to have one of the world’s largest supplies of crude oil, with 115 billion barrels in proven reserves. But foreign know-how is key to its plans to boost oil output to 4 million barrels a day within four to five years, from 2.4 million barrels currently.
It is gross negligence on the part of the American political establishment for the country to be up to 70% dependent on imports of this strategic material. And the tiny SPR is but a drop in the bucket. But no matter. The US is in fantasyland for the moment. One day that will end, and in all likelhood it will not end well.
From the transcript of President Obama’s news conference:
The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.
I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place…
The Iranian people can speak for themselves. That’s precisely what’s happened in the last few days. In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice. Despite the Iranian government’s efforts to expel journalists and isolate itself, powerful images and poignant words have made their way to us through cell phones and computers. And so we’ve watched what the Iranian people are doing.
This is what we’ve witnessed. We’ve seen the timeless dignity of tens of thousands of Iranians marching in silence. We’ve seen people of all ages risk everything to insist that their votes are counted and that their voices are heard.
Above all, we’ve seen courageous women stand up to the brutality and threats, and we’ve experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets. While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful, we also know this: those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people. It must govern through consent and not coercion.
President Obama’s comments on the atrocities of the Iranian regime seem quite a bit stronger than some critics, like Andrew McCarthy, anticipated (though he still doesn’t use the word “freedom” often). That’s a positive development. And good riddance to the “deeper wisdom” of Obama’s previous reticence on the outrages perpetrated by Khamenei on the Iranian people. Let’s see if these words are meaningful, or just an empty attempt at feel-good-ism; time will tell. (Here’s a candidate for test #1.)
Although there are 1,300 competing providers of health insurance, the Obama administration says that there needs to be a government funded, single payer option. But does health care need radical restructuring at all? George Will says no and provides some facts:
Although 70 percent of insured Americans rate their health care arrangements good or excellent, radical reform of health care is supposedly necessary because there are 45.7 million uninsured. That number is, however, a “snapshot” of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. Many of them are briefly uninsured between jobs. If all the uninsured were assembled for a group photograph, and six months later the then-uninsured were assembled for another photograph, about half the people in the photos would be different.
Almost 39 percent of the uninsured are in five states — Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, all of which are entry points for immigrants. About 21 percent — 9.7 million — of the uninsured are not citizens. Up to 14 million are eligible for existing government programs — Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, veterans’ benefits, etc. — but have not enrolled. And 9.1 million have household incomes of at least $75,000 and could purchase insurance. Those last two cohorts are more than half of the 45.7 million.
Insuring the perhaps 20 million persons who are protractedly uninsured because they cannot afford insurance is conceptually simple: Give them money — (refundable) tax credits or debit cards (which have replaced food stamps) loaded with a particular value. This would produce people who are more empowered than dependent. Unfortunately, advocates of a government option consider that a defect.
The fact that the New York Times felt it necessary to cook the books in its recent poll about health care suggests that the fervor on this issue is synthetic.
Andrew McCarthy in NRO has a very harsh verdict in the matter of President Obama and Iran:
as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of “social justice,” and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, “There Is No God but Politics“, comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — “equal rights” and “social justice” are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.
The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left: He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America’s history, but a “pragmatist” in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power.
It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters. As this position became increasingly untenable politically, and as Democrats became nervous that his silence would become a winning political round for Republicans, he was moved grudgingly to burble a mild censure of the mullah’s “unjust” repression — on the order of describing a maiming as a regrettable “assault,” though enough for the Obamedia to give him cover. But expect him to remain restrained…
That will change only if, unexpectedly, it appears that the freedom-fighters may win, at which point he’ll scoot over to the right side of history and take all conceivable credit.
McCarthy seems unduly harsh to us, even though we have been quite critical of the President’s to-date reticence on Iran. We’ll just have to see if that last bit about the President’s taking credit comes to pass. HT: Ace
Andrew Sullivan, who has done a very good job of linking the various internet postings in the Iranian civil strife, said this amusing and absurd video was “why Obama was watching his words” on Iran. If that is valid, and this crude anti-American propaganda is effective, then it hardly matters what an American government says, the people are so paranoid and gullible. (There is evidence to support this contention.)
We see the government video quite differently. The video shows that the Iranian government is very concerned about “secret messages” coming in over satellite TV, and about the use of the internet for subversive purposes. The video makes the point that if you plot against the government you will get caught because the government has spies everywhere.
The creepiest element is that the bad guy (pro-American) in the film gets caught because his sister rats him out by calling 113, the national hotline to the secret police. Question: if a government is that paranoid and its security apparatus is deployed against the people in such a gross and obvious way, why should we be concerned that pointing out the truth offends them?
The NYT had some conflicting findings in its poll:
77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care…72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65…the survey results depict a nation desperate for change
77% of those polled are pretty satisfied with the quality of their own care. Why is that an indicator of “a nation desperate for change”? But that’s not the real problem with this poll of 895 adults. Here’s the problem, as it often is in NYT polls: the sample is skewed left:
What do you make of a poll of people who voted Obama 2 to 1 over McCain? The New York Times continues to embarrass itself daily, and shows no respect whatsoever to its readers when it prints rubbish like this.
Mark Steyn discusses the problems of appearing neutral in the matter of Iran:
For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight…
great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims…You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.
For the Obama administration, this presents a particular challenge — because the president’s preferred rhetorical tic is to stake out the two sides and present himself as a dispassionate, disinterested soul of moderation: “There are those who would argue…” on the one hand, whereas “there are those who insist…” on the other, whereas he is beyond such petty dogmatic positions…
in his recent speech in Cairo he applied the same technique. Among his many unique qualities, the 44th president is the first to give the impression that the job is beneath him — that he is too big and too gifted to be confined to the humdrum interests of one nation state. As my former National Review colleague David Frum put it, the Obama address offered “the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies.”…
What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International?…they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.
The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity.
Steyn observes that Obama’s use of opposing straw men is a rhetorical feint: “That was pretty much his shtick on abortion at Notre Dame…such studied moderation is usually a crock: Obama is an abortion absolutist, supporting partial-birth infanticide, and even laws that prevent any baby so inconsiderate as to survive the abortion from receiving medical treatment.” The appearance of being above it all conceals a rather clear agenda that can only be seen clearly in the actions or the inactions of Obama.
It seems apparent to us that, based on the administration’s inaction and feeble responses to the unbelievable events in Iran, it is reasonable to conclude that the administration is more or less siding with the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad faction. Certainly that is the conclusion that the Mousavi camp appears to have drawn.
…………………………………………….THE WHITE HOUSE………………………………………….
………………………………………..Office of the Press Secretary……………………………………
________________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release…………………………………………………………………….June 20, 2009
The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.
Martin Luther King once said — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.
The President underscored the outrage expressed in the statement by going out for ice cream. You be the judge of the seriousness of the message that President Obama means to convey to the Supreme Leader.
VDH sums up the rather narcissistic and strange journey that President Obama has put America on for the past six months:
in the Middle East, in the case of Israel, with Turkey, on the recent Iranian upheaval, and during the South America visit, Obama is clearly to the left of Europe. He sees himself more as multicultural prophet born out of the Third World, foe of colonialism, angry at past imperialism, skeptical of capitalism, eager to showcase his non-traditional ancestry and tripartite nomenclature. By coming from the West, but separating himself from the history of his own country, Obama has become a citizen of the world, who polls far higher, as intended, in the Middle East, than does his own country…
almost all Obama’s historical references were wrong or distorted: Berlin airlift, death camps, Inquisition, Muslim contribution to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, Muslim discoveries of breakthroughs in science, math, printing, etc., suggesting that as a postmodernist he (and/or his speechwriters) does not really believe in absolute truth, but rather relative competing narratives predicated on race/class/gender. And the means of magnifying the accomplishments of those “without power” justifies the ends of diminishing those “with power.” The list of other inaccuracies in his Cairo speech could be expanded from the contemporary Middle East to his references to John Adams and Islam…
Here at home — We know the boilerplate: The President outlines the problem, punctuated with those awful “them” and “they” and “some” and “others” who as extremists stand in the way of all good things and present “false choices”, but remain unnamed. (Sort of like the tropes in 1984)…These are the prefaces to his reluctance to … (fill in the blanks: run the private sector, spend massive amounts of money, take over health care, raise taxes, etc.).
Then he pauses, takes a deep breath, and in fact outlines ways to take over GM, regulate compensation, run up massive deficits, nationalize health care, and plan record tax hikes…he finishes with variations on the old campaign formula “this is the moment”, “hope and change”, “yes, we can”, “we will not be deterred.” No one can quite believe that one has just heard Obama deny that he’s going to do exactly what he then outlines he is going to do.
Obama himself gave us ample warning of his reckless grandiosity during the 2008 campaign. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. The situation has only gotten worse in the months since his inauguration. And there’s 3.5 years to go. Help!
Obama talks tough, at long last, in his Saturday radio address. But it’s not about the poor people being killed or beaten senseless in Iran, as in this graphic scene — it’s about credit card companies. AP:
this crisis may have started on Wall Street. But its impacts have been felt by ordinary Americans who rely on credit cards, home loans and other financial instruments…Those ridiculous contracts — pages of fine print that no one can figure out — will be a thing of the past. You’ll be able to compare products, with descriptions in plain language, to see what is best for you…
I welcome a debate about how we can make sure our regulations work for businesses and consumers…what I will not accept — what I will vigorously oppose — are those who do not argue in good faith…While I’m not spoiling for a fight, I’m ready for one
The most interesting aspect of Obama’s muted response to Iran is that it is a truly revelatory moment. After all, as Roger Simon notes, Iran is an issue that, at the moment at least, “clearly unites the left and right emotionally.” The easiest choice for a politician would be to go with popular opinion; but Obama does not. Therefore, there is either deep strategy at work, or some deeply held belief. We would hope for strategy, but that’s not what we think is really going on.
Stratfor reports a bomb blast, a suicide bomber according to state media, in Iran the day after Khamenei warned that “terrorist plots” are associated with protests against his regime:
A bomb blast near the mausoleum of Islamic Republic of Iran founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, located in southern Tehran, has left one person dead and at least two others wounded June 20. It is not clear who was behind the blast but the authorities will use this incident to engage in a wider crackdown…
the blast comes a day after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a rare Friday prayer sermon, in which he said, “Street demonstrations are a target for terrorist plots. Who would be responsible if something happened?” This statement and the fact that the original reports of the blast came from state media make the explosion a suspicious development which may have been engineered by the security establishment
Meanwhile, only 3000 people gathered to get clobbered or killed by the police and Basij at a demonstration. Police beat people trying to get to the protest. Kristallnacht seems more disciplined than this: “”From Iran: I am home since 10 minute and Basij forces and police were killing young people like animals”…
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a rare but critical Friday sermon prayer June 19 in which he addressed the continuing public unrest in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the June 12 presidential election, as well as the schism among the country’s political leadership. As expected, he took a clear position in favor of the president, rejecting accusations of electoral fraud…
Khamenei has clearly opted for the forcible suppression of the uprising…the country’s elite ideological military force, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has taken command of domestic law enforcement in Tehran. Consequently, from today forward, we can expect to see security forces crush protests…
Khamenei…said, “Differences of opinion do exist between officials which is natural. But it does not mean there is a rift in the system. Ever since the last presidential election there existed differences of opinion between Ahmadinejad and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (the second most powerful cleric in the state). Of course my outlook is closer to that of Ahmadinejad in domestic and foreign policy.”…
The stage is now set for a major confrontation, but it is unclear who will emerge victorious. Regardless of which political faction wins, Khamenei has decided that it is worth the risk to bring in the IRGC. Though the Iranian state security apparatus is adept at extinguishing protests, it is still a risky gamble that will further fuel the fire of discontent.
Here’s some reaction to Khamenei’s speech. Who knows where things go from here?
Quick: name two countries or leaders that Barack Obama dislikes or disfavors, and two more countries or leaders that he likes or shows deference to. It was easy, wasn’t it, even after five short months of Obama’s Presidency? Here are some potential candidates as answers in case you were stumped: (a) England, (b) Israel, (c) Saudi Arabia, (d) Honduras, and (e) Iran.
It appears to us to be more than strategy and tactics that President Obama shows disrespect to, or bullies, America’s traditional allies, while appearing inappropriately obsequent to certain countries, including outright enemies.
You may think that President Obama’s vision is correct, and that the “re-branding” of America is a good thing, or you may think that the President’s policies are foolish, even dangerous. For us, Obama’s reticence at the atrocities in Iran have finally made it very clear whom his gut reactions favor and disfavor, and we find that the conclusions we have drawn are pretty disturbing.
As they note over at Powerline, you don’t have to be much of an American to side with besieged democracy protesters over authoritarian anti-American dictators who are comfortable in their thuggish ways. And then there’s Obama…..
