Tuesday, January 09, 2007
What do Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George W. Bush have in common?
"Liberal" lawmakers want to impeach them.
Iranian reformist lawmakers have started collecting signatures in Parliament to demand the impeachment of the country's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So far, 38 signatures have been collected out of the 72 required to formally summon Ahmadinejad and request his impeachment.
The interesting question is, how courageous are those 38 signers? Very, or not so much? The answer would be instructive.
In any case, Iran's reformist rump is lately making more noise:
Iranian reformist parliamentarians on Saturday blamed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government for failing to prevent United Nations sanctions....
The only way to pass the crisis is to build confidence ... but a holding Holocaust conference and financing the Hamas government creates mistrust and tension," Noureddin Pirmoazzen, the spokesman of parliament's reformist faction, told Reuters.
We have heard rumors for a year that the Iranian elites think that Ahmadinejad is a loon. That members of Parliament are now openly slamming him to the Western press and collecting signatures against him suggests that his support is much weaker than it was when he was elected less than two years ago.
Of course, all the usual hedges and caveats apply, including the most important one: I know very little about Iran, much as I have tried to get up to speed.
7 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Tue Jan 09, 07:02:00 PM:
Surprised and impressed are my first reactions. I'll try to remember to ask a Persian linguist I know about this at work tomorrow...
By 
, at
Tue Jan 09, 09:56:00 PM:
And just who are these reformists? Since the US media gave Mr. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani the same title and he is just a tad less radical than Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one wonders.
By Gordon Smith, at
Wed Jan 10, 09:18:00 AM:
Thank Heavens someone on the right finally got around to comparing these two men!
By ScurvyOaks, at
Wed Jan 10, 11:12:00 AM:
Hey Screwy, I know you're a smart analyst (though I often disagree with you). But if the only comment of yours I had read were the fatuous one above, I would mistakenly conclude that you're unserious. My unsolicited advice is this: preserving the value of your comment currency is more desirable than engaging in the admittedly enjoyable one-line cheap shots.
(Of course, I'll certainly concede that I don't always follow my own advice on that score.)
Cheers.
By Gordon Smith, at
Wed Jan 10, 01:05:00 PM:
Unserious? You mean unlike those who would discuss matters of war with grave looks on their faces? I find most of the pro-war set to be the most unserious people in the blogosphere. Ignoring mistake after mistake, miscalculation after miscalculation, blunder after blunder, lie after lie. The people who continually say that we're six months away from big things happening in Iraq or that we've got one last chance to make things right are not serious people.
I'm often fatuous and terribly unserious, but that doesn't make me less credible when compared to those who believe in the wisdom of the Bush administration's foreign policy of shitting the bed then working feverishly to unshit it.
I'll take the compliment you offer. Thanks! But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that anyone who argued vociferously for this war, for its escalation, or for its limitless continuation are serious people. I think of them as fools.
By Dawnfire82, at
Wed Jan 10, 03:37:00 PM:
'Everyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid.'
You're quite credible; it's hard to argue with titanic logical abilities like that.
By Dawnfire82, at
Wed Jan 10, 03:38:00 PM:
Oh, and the linguist didn't know what to make of it either and made some comment like, 'Dammit Jim, I'm a linguist, not a political analyst.'
