Oh no

"Official" reports are saying 19 are dead in Tehran after today's protests. The protesters are saying that it's more like 150. You'd have to be crazy or grossly uninformed to believe anything with the word "official" on it coming out of Iran.

Ahmadinejad, Khameini, and the whole crew: COWARDS. Despicable cowards.

God bless the men and women who stood against them. God bless the families of the dead.

***

People are now saying that this "discredits" the Iranian government. Yet according to CNN, Iranian officials are still invited to the G8 meeting. All Obama has brought himself to say is a brief statement that includes the sentence, "Iran must understand that the world is watching."

As we used to say in elementary school, "No duh". Obama must understand that while he cares that the whole world is watching, Ahmadinejad and Khameini don't, nor have they for years. Come to think of it, China didn't seem to care that the world was watching when they sent tanks against unarmed students. I wonder if anyone said that Chinese communism was "discredited". If they did, it didn't seem to take.

It makes you wonder if we're cowards too. Sure, a different, much more benign variety. But still-- cowards. We deal with governments like China for money. We give reset buttons to Russia. Our president still hasn't amended his "no preconditions" statement on Iran. Two American journalists have been sentenced to a decade of hard labor in North Korea, which, by the way, has tested two nuclear bombs and has a missile aimed at Hawaii set to launch on Independence Day. And all we can do is wag our collective finger.

May it be that the "election" in Iran was as the falling of small stones on a mountainside that start an avalanche. May the Iranians wake up and realize that they are strong.* As are the Chinese, and the North Koreans, and the Burmese, and the Cubans, and the Venzuelans, and the Belarusians, and the Vietnamese... may all those who live without freedom in this world.

*With all due respect to Tolkien