Is Iran’s Government Getting Ready To Collapse?

The Bangkok Post recently interviewed a former officer of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence service, who has been in regular contact with the Green Party since he left Iran.:

A former high-ranking intelligence official in Iran has called for his country to form better relations with the United States and Israel and says the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on the verge of collapse.

In an exclusive interview with the Bangkok Post Sunday, Mohammad Reza Madhi, a former officer in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence service, described Mr Ahmadinejad as ”crazy” and unfit to lead his country.

”He has already destroyed international relationships with many countries and made them enemies of Iran,” said Mr Madhi, who was forced to flee Iran in 2008 after being jailed for 73 years on what he described as ”trivial” charges. ”This has cost the Iranian people so much. His ideas are dangerous.” (“jailed for 73 years” is surely a typo – ed).

Iran’s opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said on Friday he was ready to sacrifice his life in defence of the people’s right to protest peacefully against the government after the worst unrest since the disputed June presidential election.

***

Mr Madhi was highly critical of Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, a spiritual adviser to a group of hard-line fundamentalists closely connected to senior leaders in the current Iranian government.

”He is a very crazy man who hates Israel and the United States especially. Unfortunately, President Ahmadinejad is one of his big fans as well.”

The former intelligence officer said that instead of imposing sanctions, western nations should look to supporting opposition groups and not recognise the Ahmadinejad government.

Oh, but what has the Obama administration been doing all year… and getting rebuffed at every turn?

Hint: Iran to Kerry: what part of “Drop dead” don’t you groveling weaklings understand?

Or as Mere Rhetoric reports on the latest outreach: Iran To US: No Visa For Kerry, Please Consider Yourself Officially Humiliated.

The Iranians can’t even muster enough respect for Obama to let him send envoys to debase themselves in front of the mullahs. The administration wanted to dispatch Kerry to Tehran in the midst of the most recent crackdown, a move naturally seen as a shameless betrayal by the Iranian dissidents being beaten and shot and run over by basij cars. Nope.

***

Remember when conservatives ridiculed “smart power” as a faux sophisticated excuse for US obsequiousness? And the left said that conservatives were thoughtless warmongers and – in fact – Obama was going to restore America’s dignity and respect? That’s definitely the sense I’m getting from this gambit. Dignity. And. Respect.

If this what the left had in mind when they kept hyping the “smart power”, they can keep it.  I’ll take “the cowboy”  over the “weak horse” any day.

Hat tip: Weasel Zippers

MORE:

Rick Moran at The American Thinker: This is why the Iranian government will not survive

Voter’s Remorse In Movie Form

I just happened to come across two excellent videos that eloquently express Obama buyers’ remorse. I found them within minutes of each other, while searching for something totally unrelated.

Here’s the first one, I found at the Daily Puma:

Voter’s Remorse (A Parody of “Runaway” by Del Shannon)

And this epic video, in the form of a movie trailer, I found at Hill Buzz:

America Rising: An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians

An important notice from Hillbuzz:

UPDATE: This is a classic example of the games YouTube plays on Dr. Utopia’s behalf.  If you click on the YouTube video above, you’ll see that its hit-count has been locked at 6885 or so for the last several hours.  YouTube does not seem to want any videos challenging Liberals to receive high hit-counts.  YouTube and Obots either knock the videos down, removing them for shady reasons, or they lock the counters so the videos don’t seem to be popular.

We can prove this is a scam because when traffic leaves HillBuzz, it registers where you go next if you follow a link from us.  Over 3,000 people have gone to YouTube from this link to watch this video.  That’s 3,000 people going to watch that TODAY ALONE.  The video was locked at 6885 last night before the new day’s tally started here on WordPress, so that means the video should have at LEAST 9,885 hits on it, from all the people who watched it off this site.

YouTube is clearly agenda-driven, suppressing this video.

We have no idea why this scares Democrats so damn much, but we IMPLORE YOU to do whatever you can to make sure as many people as possible see it.  If Obots, Democrats, and YouTube are going to such great lengths to keep this from going viral, it sure needs to go viral.

Jim Geraghty at the Campaign Spot did a good job explaining the reason for the anger, and disenchantment on the part of the American people, (and it has nothing to do with “messaging”, David Corn):

When you overpromise that everything on your spending list is “shovel-ready”, and then you later say that actually large numbers of the projects aren’t actually ready, people conclude they’ve been swindled.

When you promise that you’re building a web site to help track the spending, and then that web site is full of bad data and nonexistent congressional districts, people think the whole thing is a con.  When you constantly use this meaningless, unverfiable “jobs saved or created” statistic, people suspect you’re using imaginary metrics because the real ones look so bad for you.

When you explicitly promise that all of the health care negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and then they’re all done behind closed doors in the Senate Majority Leader’s office, people begin to think you don’t really care about you campaign promises.

When you promise not to raise any taxes on anyone making more than $250,000, and then turn around and immediately raise tobacco taxes, people conclude your word is worthless. Or we could look at the promises to renegotiate NAFTA, or that the stimulus would get Caterpillar rehiring, or going through the entire budget line by line, or pledging to eliminate earmarks, or lobbyists not working in the White House, or posting bills online for five days before signing them, or recognize the Armenian Genocide, or any one of many, many others..

This past year has also seen a lot of controversial and unpopular policies and ideas that this president didn’t campaign on, because campaigning on them would have meant he would have gotten shellacked.

Read the whole thing.

Rush Limbaugh Update

The New York Daily News reports that he returns to the airwaves on Wednesday,  “a week after hospital scare”.

Limbaugh, whose Hawaiian vacation happened to coincide with President Obama‘s, held a press conference at which he couldn’t resist jabbing one of his favorite targets, Obama’s health care reform plan.

His own experience, Limbaugh said, proves the American health care system works just fine and needs no fixing.

Defenders of the Obama plan replied that the health care system has always worked just fine for multimillionaires.

That’s actually a good come back. I’m sure Rush will have much more to say about it on his show, Wednesday.

Meanwhile, via Hot Air Headlines we hear that Roger Ebert of all people is making  bad fat jokes about Limbaugh’s weight?

How bizarre. Ebert has lost a bunch of weight, but so has Rush:

I don’t get it.

Previously:

Rush Rushed To Hospital With Chest Pains

Video:Lieberman Slams Obama For Trying Abdulmutallab in Criminal Court

Video via Weasel Zippers:

“Yes, we should follow the rule of law, but the rule of law that is relative here, is the rule of the law of war”.

But what if Obama doesn’t believe in the War on Terror? What if, to him this isn’t a matter of war, but a matter of catching a few global miscreants, who may as well be robbing  7/11s, as far as he’s concerned?

That’s a problem, as far as most Americans are concerned!

But you can always trust the left, (with their fellow travelers, the MSM) to botch the story. As far as they are concerned, those of us in the media who are watching, and wondering how seriously Obama takes the terrorist  threat, are actually hurting GOP electoral chances, as The American Spectator reports:

Media Warns of Grave GOP Danger

Of course, the Obama administration and the Democratic Left don’t like these questions, which threaten to expose their soft underbelly and show that the emperor has no clothes. That’s why they’ve enlisted their allies in the big media to fight back.

The Washington Post, for instance, editorialized yesterday against “a groundless campaign to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terror.” “Soft on terror?” exclaimed the Post. “Not this president”!

The New York Times, naturally, agrees. “The Republicans,” they whined, “predictably seized on the [Dec. 25 terror] plot for political advantage by absurdly accusing Mr. Obama of being weak on national security.”

“What is needed now,” intoned the Times, “is what was needed after 9/11: a clearheaded, non-politicized assessment of what went wrong and non-hysterical remedies that work this time.”

Not to be outdone, ABC News also chimed in with a supposedly fair “news story” (as opposed to an editorial or commentary) with this headline: “Unlike 9/11, Partisanship Worse After Christmas Attack: In Wake of Attack on Northwest Flight 253, Partisan Sniping on Capitol Hill Amplified.”

ABC News laments the loss of “bipartisanship” that supposedly existed for one brief shining moment after 9/11 — before, the Democratic Left likes to tell us, George W. Bush ruined the domestic political comity that (supposedly) existed by “recklessly and foolishly invading Iraq.”

Read the whole thing.

The 2009 Weblog Awards are off

Off.

Damn, this was going to be my, year, too, I just know it:

It is with a great deal of regret that I must inform everyone that The 2009 Weblog Awards are canceled.

Unfortunately the resources required to handle the load of voting (nearly 1,000,000 votes in 2008) could not be adequately provisioned. Even if the servers and bandwidth required appeared today it would be at least a few weeks before everything could be ready for voting. (Rest here).

Hat tip: Watts Up With That