Those Who Stand Up for Justice....

President Obama bravely observed that history has a way of noting those who seek justice. Indeed, it is usually done posthumously, a nice bronze plague somewhere or a flower bed perhaps near the spot where they were shot or disappeared. How uplifting and inspirational and meaningless. The sound bites from the White House are meant to placate the carping from the right wing in this country. The Iranian government could care less about the press coverage; their real concern is to control the perceptions of the non protesters: who are these people in the streets? The regime needs to preserve its legitimacy and the monopoly on the use of force. Nothing Obama says will have a substantive influence on the internal power struggle over the elections in Iran.

Obama felt he has to respond to the Ayatollahs of the Republican Party who were posturing about being tough on Iran...pure theater, pure bull, 24/7. It needs to be pointed out that the United States has quite recently seen a Presidential election stolen from its nominal winner....remember 2000? It was only Gore's timidity that saved the country from a series of major protests in the streets. Michael Moore had a comment upon the Gore capitulation in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 when Gore refused to support a group of Black Congressional Representatives in a bid to challenge the election results.

The current death toll in Iran is unfortunate and we all can hope that it does not reach the level of say the Detroit riots in 1967. The Iranian militias does look or act much differently than the Chicago Police Department did at the Democratic Convention of 1968. So, as Archie use to say to Edith, "Stifle it. Why don't ya." For a country that still holds hundreds of people in preventative detention and has 50% of its citizens, in a recent poll, saying it is all right to torture suspects sometime, we should clean up our own act.