I have been using my twitter to gripe about US media and blogger obsession with Iranian politics.
- tom moody 6-22-2009 3:16 pm

i dont know why you have such a problem with it. gripe about the tenor if you find it off, but you should be pleased that we are so engaged in foreign affairs. id much rather people be obsessing over iran than american idol.
- dave 6-22-2009 4:07 pm

Fomenting rebellion in Iran has been on the national agenda for some time. This is one of those "outbreaks of democracy" the Iraq war was fought to inspire. Which is your favorite mullah faction?
- tom moody 6-22-2009 5:21 pm

maybe im being naive but i dont think we have any sway over the proceedings. and you cant help but feel inspired by and hopeful for the iranian people despite the fact that their leaders do not seem to represent their ultimate aims. i have pathos for anyone willing to risk life or limb in pursuit of greater freedoms even if that hope is somewhat misguided. and im not sure what your problem is with outbreaks of democracy. surely you dont support repressive regimes, and you dont want western powers meddling, so this has to be the best possible scenario, an essentially grassroots movement born out of hubris and frustration. we're just cheerleaders at this point.
- dave 6-22-2009 5:59 pm

We all love stories about reformers and repressed people rising up against their masters. Why is this the top story in America day after day? We don't know anything about the politics--how many people realize that both sides embrace a theocracy? National health care and the continuing bailout mess are being pushed off the front pages by this essentially local story. Pardon my cynicism but it displaces American Idol because it's better reality TV.

As for Western powers meddling, the more attention remains focused on the minutiae of the election protests, the more calls arise for Obama to "make a stronger statement." Eventually there will be calls to "do something."

- tom moody 6-22-2009 6:26 pm

we all know the media feeds off drama and is generally substance free. do you really expect that if this werent going on that the issues you stated would be covered in any way close to what youd consider satisfactory? and while it may be better reality tv, it is, in fact, reality. im as cynical as anyone when the media shifts into disaster tv mode but for all the voyeurism it does inspire some people to act, or at least display magnanimous impulses. truly there is that concern that obama will wade in too deep but for now he seems to be holding fast to the proper course. you can keep that "i told ya so" handy though.

and i thought thats what made us decent human beings, to have compassion. surely needs to be tempered with prudence and good sense but think wed all be worse off without it.
- dave 6-22-2009 7:06 pm

WWJCD
- bill 6-22-2009 7:20 pm

You guys are obviously going to have to settle this with a walk off</zoolander> in the Big Indian auditorium.

- jim 6-23-2009 12:31 am

im prepared to have a sit off on the porch with an eye rolling contest if theres no clear victor.
- dave 6-23-2009 1:12 am

sounds fair.
- bill 6-23-2009 2:04 am

The issue here is Iran coverage 24/7 when no one knows diddly what's going on (Juan Cole has one take--I've read several other completely different ones).

Yes, CEO bonuses and bailouts were quite the hot issues before media and bloggers decided Iran was our top priority.

If you're saying I lack compassion that's just wrong.
- tom moody 6-23-2009 3:57 am

did you edit your post to take out condemnations of the left?
- dave 6-23-2009 4:11 am

I've been using the more general "bloggers"--which is supposed to be a counterweight to the main media. Iran has been the top story on HuffPo, Salon, and TPM. We haven't had such unanimity on a topic since everyone decided invading Afghanistan was super great.
- tom moody 6-23-2009 4:28 am

I had a statement about putting a heartwarming story ahead of suspicion of the teabaggers or something like that, which I thought was redundant and took out seconds after I wrote it, sorry. Was that what you were interpreting as a lack of compassion on my part?
- tom moody 6-23-2009 4:37 am

that didnt answer my question. didnt you question the left for easily succumbing to emotional narratives and did you edit that out of your post?
- dave 6-23-2009 4:38 am

i wasnt suggesting you lacked compassion, i was making a more general point that compassion is a motivating factor of the left that requires dispassionate reasoning to create good policy.
- dave 6-23-2009 4:46 am

I didn't say as a general rule the left easily succumbs to emotional narratives. I do think it has in this case and should be a lot more skeptical of the official narrative. I felt the same way about bombing Afghanistan for human rights. The left fell in behind Bush/Cheney on that one.
- tom moody 6-23-2009 4:51 am

My favorite part of teevee on Iran (which I've seen very, very little of) was Mike Huckabee sharing his expertise. Also too, John "bomb, bomb, bomb" McCain suddenly cares about the people of Iran.
- mark 6-23-2009 4:42 pm

One of my early twitter quips on the subject was "they need to get their house in order so we can bomb them"
- tom moody 6-24-2009 12:03 pm

Daniel Luban on Lobelog offered this analogy:

But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”

In a campaign dubbed "Operation Clark County," the left-leaning Guardian in the UK organized readers to send in letters to residents of Clark County, Ohio. The goal was to convince undecideds in the uber-swing state to vote for John Kerry. After streams of hate mail decrying foreign meddling were sent back across the Atlantic, here was the predictable final result:

The most significant stat here is how Clark County compares to the other 15 Ohio counties won by Gore in 2000. Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore's winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark.

To no one's surprise, voters in Clark County, about one in five of whom received a letter from overseas, became more supportive of the Bush administration as a result of this campaign.

Another piquant contribution from the War Nerd:

Imagine the other way around; imagine Iranian Islamic tv covering, say, a classic culture-war US election like Nixon in 1972. You’d see Persians in expensive turbans blanket-covering every demonstration, every love-in (well, maybe not those so much), every draft-card burning…and then the US government announces that Nixon just stomped McGovern in the biggest landslide ever. Who’d believe it? That is, unless you knew that for every loud camera-hog hippie you saw on tv there were about a hundred fat nobodies wishing Kent State was a daily event.