Starting from the bottom:

• I said foreign, you guys. People from North America aren’t frightening, because even if they’re batshit crazy, we know them. All of us know a few Michelle Bachmanns or Glenn Becks or Fred Phelpses,¹ and they look like us. As do Canadians — who, moreover, are simply not threatening.
• Castro hasn’t scared anybody for decades. Plus, he’s now like 99 years old and mostly concerned with his pipeline of black-market Depends undergarments. That brother of his who’s supposedly doing the dictatoring now is a total empty shirt. How empty? If dictators were legendary comedians, it’d be like Groucho Marx handing his role over to Zeppo.
• Daleks, huh? I must admit I hadn’t thought of that, so props for being outside the box. OK, this may be geek heresy to some but I’m going there anyway: Daleks dream about being as badass as Cylons, and then they wake up and apologize.
• OMG — Ahmadinejad, right! How could I forget?! Now I feel stupid. Well, he’s clearly The Man now in the scary crazy-ass foreign despot category.

"Beard still there? …Yep, still there. Phew!"

I feel dumb for having forgotten about him, since only last week our ball accidentally went into his yard and he paraded it on TV like it was a fucking UFO or something.

I was like, “Hey, a little help? Could you toss that back over here?”

And he was all, “Look! Look, everyone! I have captured his ball! The accursed imperialist ball that was menacing the skies over my house is in my hands, wretched and defeated! Victory is mine!”

So I’m like, “DUDE. Keep it in your pants, OK? Just chill. Look, it was a bad throw. Oops! Sorry about that. But… what is your problem? ‘Menacing?!?’ Whatever. And it’s not like it hit your car, or broke a window or something. Muthafucka, what are you celebrating for — you didn’t even catch it! You fished it out of your damn hedge after like, five minutes of rooting around, for shit’s sake.”

But dammit if A-jad doesn’t just keep standing there posing, holding it up over his head. So I go, “You know what? FINE. Keep it if it means so much to you. I hope you and the ball have a beautiful life together. I’ve got a whole box of other ones just like it.”

The guy is a nutjob. And get this: the next day I saw him picking my oranges. Can you believe that shit?

How is it that I still occasionally think that I’ve seen it all? Specifically, with regard to the reflexive disingenuousness of partisan political idiocy? My hope for the reformation of our national miscourse keeps feeling more and more audacious.

At this point I feel compelled to alert you, my esteemed readers, that the remainder of this post will contain expressions garnished with no small amount of profanity. If this does not suit your taste, I hope that you will keep in mind that 1) you were alerted beforehand, and 2) it’s my fucking blog.

As I was saying… today’s attempt to make my head explode comes courtesy of Stephen Hayes and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard:

All week, the Obama administration [has] bent over backwards to avoid questioning the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. In this, Obama became a de facto ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Although Obama finally spoke about the protesters–”the whole world is watching,” he said–he never expressed real support for them…

“On several occasions, I’ve had supporters of Mousavi say we need President Obama,” reported CNN’s Reza Sayah, from Tehran. When Wolf Blitzer asked Sayah directly whether the protesters want Obama to speak out in support of their cause, Sayah responded: “I think they do, but they’re realistic.”

“Realistic” about the weakness, about the foolish and counterproductive “realism,” of an American president. How sad.

You know how they say it’s always a good in a critique to start off by praising something, or saying something positive? I’m subscribing to that theory, because you do have one statement in there that I fully agree with: “How sad.”

Of course, on the question of what is sad, as well as on every other point in this excerpt, you are absolutely and unambiguously fucking wrong. What is sad — distressingly sad — is that you two reactionary neocon fuckwits are so goddamned far down your ideological rabbit holes that when a human tragedy is unfolding in front of our eyes, you immediately try to exploit it for a few cheap political points. Way to win hearts and minds, assholes.

Obama’s statements are foolish, you say. Counterproductive. Counterproductive? Are you fucking serious? OK then, as long as you’re caricaturing yourself, tell us: what would you have him do? Drop the 101st Airborne in there led by Bruce Willis and save the protesters? Point a few cruise missiles at ‘em, maybe fire one across the bow? Have Obama dress in green, complete with face paint, and wave a saber over his head at a special Rose Garden press conference? Well keep it in your pants, you ridiculous jerkoffs, because it ain’t gonna fucking happen.

Were you not suffering from such serious rectal-cranial inversions, you might be aware that (as I mentioned yesterday), we’ve had a few mishaps with Iran in the past. Mainly this one time in 1953 when the CIA had this thing called Operation Ajax, in which we overthrew their democratically-elected leader and installed The Shah? The guy who was a brutal dictator but who gives a shit because he let our corporations tap Iranian oil reserves? Until 25 years later when the people rose up and ousted him, rallying behind the leadership of the current cabal of Islamic fundamentalist nutjobs who have governed the country ever since? The ones who staged a nakedly bullshit sham election to keep themselves in power? The ones who are sending their cops and militia thugs out into the streets today in a bloodthirsty, murderous crackdown against their own people?

See, if you weren’t so hellbent on discrediting Obama at any cost, you might be sentient enough to realize that Iranian ruling junta’s discrediting of itself is accelerating with each blustery protestation of legitimacy, each day of popular unrest, each desperate act of violent suppression of the will of the citizenry. You might even be able to see that perhaps the ONLY WAY Ahmadinejad and the council of imams might regain some credibility is if their fanciful and desperate accusations that the United States and its allies are acting to foment revolution were TRUE.

Why are Mousavi supporters saying they wish they had Obama to intervene, but are “realistic” about it? Because they’re not fucking idiots. They know all of this stuff that I’ve been talking about here. Do I wish we could do more to help them? Of course I do. But unlike you two punditiot troglydytes, I am realistic (there’s that word again — bummer how the real world always gets in the way, huh?) about our track record of installing governments in countries other than our own.

So do us all a favor and just be happy with your honorary PhD’s from STFU. And practice what they teach. Otherwise you start spouting that “Obama is a de facto ally of Ahmadinejad and Khamanei” horseshit, which leads the non-punditiot population to the logical conclusion, “Hayes and Kristol are de profundis assholes.”

Day six of Iran’s post-election uprising, and all we can do is watch. Or at least, all we will — and indeed should do is watch.  Not until Tuesday, four days after the Ahmadinejad government released its incredible tally pronouncing its own reelection by a 63-34 margin, did President Obama comment on the situation. And very measured comments they were, with an emphasis on honoring the will of Iranian voters rather than condemning the ruling faction.

Even these mild pronouncements were immediately seized upon by the beleaguered Iranian incumbents, accusing the U.S. of fomenting the massive unrest they now face.

This can’t come as a surprise to the Obama administration. The White House is aware of America’s status in Iran as a convenient boogeyman, earned by our history of meddling in matters of Iran’s leadership. Nevertheless, the Ahmadinejad/Khamanei junta’s tone-deaf attempt to start a “Death to America” stadium wave betrays its own panic (has invoking the U.S. become the Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of reductio ad Hitlerum?).  Panicky finger-pointing  is not the kind of behavior one expects from a party that supposedly just received a nearly two-thirds mandate.

Photo: Flickr/misterarasmus

In a curious inversion, the Iranian regime’s denouncement of the U.S. for its alleged interference on the side of the Mousavi supporters contradicts the statements of Obama’s political opponents here at home.  John McCain, apparently seeking to cement his own irrelevance, accused the President of  not supporting the protesters enough.  Neocon wingnut punditiots took it a step further, declaring that the dastardly Obama actually wants the uprising to fail. I’m looking forward to their upcoming expose of how Obama is a Hezbollah sleeper agent whose campaign money actually came from Khamanei. And how he’s having the White House raised off its foundation and rotated so that the Oval Office points toward Mecca. I’d think up more of this ludicrous bullshit, but those clowns don’t need my help.

Plus, what could be funnier than the case of Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI): in light of Iranians’ use of Twitter to successfully circumvent their government’s blocking of internet and other channels of communication abroad, Hoekstra proved himself equally and inversely clueless by tweeting:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

The rest of Twitter, to its credit, promptly trained a fire hose of derision upon Rep. Douchebag.