DAR
What a shameless, baseless, smear.

BLK: but Iran is one country where he has not the fortitude to travel to,…>>

DAR
He and his organization has monitored elections in, I believe, 83 countries, many of them easily more dangerous than Iran. So again, a shameless, and baseless, and plainly dishonest smear.

BLK: not been a statement coming from the White House that could be said to even remotely have a spine to it.>>

DAR
As an Iranian observer noted today, and I agree, the pitch and tone of his carefully worded comments have been spot on. Perfect.

Joe Scarborough called the rightwing comments about this outrageous and responded this way:

“All we would do is undermine those people in the streets the second they are attached to the United States of America. The country, after all, has been known in Iran as the Great Satan since 1979. We will undermine their cause and make no mistake of it, their cause is our cause. They are fighting this fight, though, and do not need John Sydney Mccain or Barack Obama to get out and make statements that will only play into the hands of the mullahs or Ahmadinejad. It’s so shortsighted i find it stunning.”

DAR
Anything more forcefull would be immoral. When Bush Sr. encouraged the Kurds to stand up and fight Saddam, they were mowed down by the tens of thousands as America did nothing. When, under GW Bush, the people in the republic of Georgia were encouraged to stand up against Russia, they were flattened in days.

You don’t make comments about such things when you are not in a position to back them up with action, and the US has no legal authority, right, or intention to interfere, on the ground, in Iran. If Obama were to act as in my two examples above, and the Iranians reacted en masse, there would undoubtedly be a blood bath. And that blood would be on our hands again, as it was in the above two instances.

D.
——————
Joe Klein, Time Magazine, on McCain’s comments:

“I’ve been receiving a steady stream of favorable emails from Iranian-Americans regarding my appearance on Larry King last night. They’re delighted that I made it clear that Iran is different from the other countries in the region–better educated, more sophisticated, with far greater rights for women (although not nearly enough). And they also appreciated the fact that when King asked me what John McCain should do right now, I said, “Be quiet.”

The Washington Post has a piece today about the efforts of some Republicans to make hay out of the situation in Iran. McCain, who spent the entire 2008 election making misleading statements about the nature of the Iranian government (I wonder if he still thinks Ahmadinejad is more powerful than the Supreme Leader), has been at the forefront of this. It is very unseemly. I have yet to hear what possible good it would do for the President of the United States to encourage the protesters, except to give the Iranian regime a better excuse for killing more of them. McCain’s bleatings are either for domestic political consumption or self-satisfaction, a form of hip-shooting onanism that demonstrates why he would have been a foreign policy disaster had he been elected.” TIME

For those unfamiliar with “onanism,” google it. Text, not images.