You hit you own head recently doing a face-palm thing, if so you may have hurt something. Look at the quote below, the bolded words would describe Iran during the time the US was running the show in the 25 years preceding 1979.
Do you even acknowledge the horror the citizens experiences under the installed regime?
"Parliamentary elections this Friday in Iran are far from being free and fair. Well, at least that's a step beyond those paragons of democracy - the election-free Persian Gulf monarchies."
I pointed out to you not long ago that the present Government of Iran is more democratic on a local and international level than the 'real hardliners' that actually get funding from covert operation done by both the CIA and MOSSAD. (It's going to come as a real shock to those partners to know their lives are only useful until a certain point, there will be no new Shaw of Iran, there will be international corporation and the citizens will be no better off than the worst of the worst in Saudi Arabia. No wonder the people shudder when the West comers calling.
BTW you should read what you link to, if you did read it you editing is far worse than anything I have ever posted. Re-raed the 6 paragraphs after my quoted portion. A stutter perhaps
I read the complete article - I saw that - are you into deflection or what?
I read the complete article - I saw that - are you into deflection or what?
I post a link - Poeple read the link - No cherry picking -
Meet the players
So on one side, we have the so-called "principlists" - let's call them the Khamenei party. They are - in theory - led by Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Kani, the chairman of the Council of Experts. But in practice, whatever powerful, former IRGC commanders say, goes.
A key candidate in their list is Gholam Haddad Adel, the father-in-law of Khamenei's second son, Mojtaba. He's running for a Tehran seat. This means, crucially, that the IRGC positioned the election in Tehran as a de facto referendum on Khamenei. That's something to watch closely.
The principlists boast a "United Front" that actually became seriously disunited (scattered in at least four groups). They fear the Ahmadinejad faction will manipulate the vote - via the Interior Ministry; it's an open secret in Tehran that the Ahmadinejad people have been furiously bribing blue-collar workers and peasants. The principlists know if Ahmadinejad controls the Majlis, he can't be impeached, and will confront Khamenei even more forcefully.
On the other side, we have an outfit called the Durable Front of the Islamic Revolution. Let's call them the Ahmadinejad faction. They claim to be the real principlists - and essentially are disciples of the mega-reactionary Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. Now that's a tough cookie; many times I visited his hawza in Qom, but Mesbah Yazdi refuses to talk to foreign journalists.
Ahmadinejad used to be an adoring Mesbah Yazdi worshipper. But then a theological bomb exploded; Ahmadinejad started to publicly boast that he was directly linked to the hidden Imam Mahdi - and not to the Supreme Leader, in thesis the Mahdi's representative on earth. Mesbah Yazdi was mildly horrified. He then started saying he is not the party's leader - but people hardly believe it. If they capture a lot of seats, Mesbah Yazdi will be even stronger among the neo-cons.
A third faction is led Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of the IRGC between 1981 and 1997, and the current secretary-general of the Expediency Council, the body that mediates between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians and also advises Khamenei. Among conservatives and neo-cons, this faction is not exactly very popular, even though Rezaei's game is to position himself as a viable third way.
And then there are the conservatives and neo-cons who are not aligned with anyone, with a major group led by two fierce Ahmadinejad critics, and at least 200 smaller groups.
To give an idea about the tortuous nature of the system, the major group presented a lot of current Majlis representatives, as well as other regime figures, as candidates. In the initial screening, run by the Ahmadinejad-controlled Ministry of Interior, they were rejected; but then the Guardian Council said they were OK ...
So no one should expect a Kim Jong-ilesque turn out this Friday. Expectations for Tehran are a paltry 15% - and that may be even less. A crushing majority of university students will definitely follow the boycott.
Anyone interested in examining the extraordinary impact of the aftermath of the 2009 elections in Tehran should read Death to the Dictator: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran's 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price, by Afsaneh Moqadam (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
In small town Iran and faraway provinces, the Leader - as well as the "man of the people" with a halo over his head - may still be popular. But no one, anywhere, really knows for sure whether the absolute majority of Iranians would do anything to support them.