Can you imagine if this guy was president? I don’t know how many 3AM moments this poor dude has to face – between the economy, and North Korea, and Iran, and whatever – but thank God we have a president who stops and thinks before he shoots his mouth off and makes things worse.
On NBC’s Today show this morning, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on President Obama to make a forceful declaration about the disputed re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election,” said McCain, Obama’s opponent in last year’s presidential election. “The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”
“I think it’s possible to engage. But item number one is giving the Iranian people a free and fair election,” he said.
In an unusually lengthy conversation with reporters yesterday at the end of a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Obama said he is “deeply troubled” by the violence against supporters of Iranian opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and said he considered some of Ahmadinejad’s statements “odious,” but he stopped short of denouncing the election results.
“We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can’t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election,” said the president. He indicated that he doesn’t want American pronouncements to become a distraction in Iran, where, Obama said, “sometimes the United States can be a handy political football.”
Thank God for this.
I don’t know how many 3AM moments this poor dude has to face – between the economy, and North Korea, and Iran, and whatever – but thank God we have a president who stops and thinks before he shoots his mouth off and makes things worse.
The American people have had enough of being forceful for the sake of a cool sound bite. ”Smoke ‘em out,” and “Bring it on,” “Shock and Awe,” “Mission accomplished” and all that nonsense.
We talked tough to the “Axis of Evil” and now one has 8-12 nukes and the other a thousand centrifuges. So, that clearly worked out FABULOUSLY.
And Neocons – I know it’s killing you. I know it’s killing you that we have 100,000 troops right next door to Iran and we have a president who is smart enough, and calm enough, to realize that we can’t control the outcome. Dick Cheney probably cries tears of oil over the war that he cannot wage.
And for the record:
“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election,” said McCain, Obama’s opponent in last year’s presidential election. “The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”
He did, asshat. Just not the way you would – with a bs threat made to feel better and push your party’s agenda at the expense of an entire nation of people.
We can’t fix this. All we can do is help.
And do you know what’s helping? The fact that regular Americans are helping every day Iranians through Twitter, and Facebook and proxy servers. No matter what happens here – and it might not be the outcome we want – Iran will be better for it and our reputation with her people will have improved accordingly.
How can they all hate us when clearly, as a people, we jumped to their defense? How can you paint America as an enemy when her people – by and large – have done everything from retweeting to sacrificing their own computer’s security to help Iranians get the word out?
So keep Tweeting and retweeting. Keep linking and commenting. Keep being an example of what’s good in this nation’s people when you do stuff outside of politics.
And filter out propoganda – whether it’s coming from Iran, or the Republican from Arizona.
