Iran

Question: How do you water down the possible significance of a statement by an Iranian diplomat?Answer: Wait for an AFP journalist to revise a previous raw report.A short unbylined dispatch from the wire service reported that the diplomat "apparently misspoke" when he said that Iran has "the right to a nuclear weapon" not long after the incident occurred. (Dictionary.com tells us that "Used…

Unnoticed in the recent upheaval surrounding the fallout from the Iranian elections earlier this month has been how it could affect the price of oil, and therefore the price of gas. And according to Fox Business Network "Happy Hour" co-host Eric Bolling, the longer this goes, the more likely you'll see it at the gas pump. Bolling appeared on the Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto"…

On Thursday evening, the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News presented opposite takes on whether Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is really a moderate, or whether he is actually about as extreme and dangerous as current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. CBS’s Mark Phillips argued that Mousavi is merely more moderate in "tone" than Ahmadinejad while taking similar policy…

Some attention has been paid to the fact that the microblogging service Twitter had decided to push off its scheduled maintenance Tuesday morning as the situation in Iran became steadily more embroiled in conflict. As it happened, Twitter was a major source of information coming out of that repressed society as news was happening. Twitter had, though, scheduled a few hours down time just when…

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:It is not…

"Ahmadinejad won. Get Over It."That was both the headline and the theme of an astounding story written for Politico by the former foreign policy husband and wife team of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.  Their shtick while at the Bush White House was that we needed to "engage" Iran and left their jobs  "with a growing sense of alarm" that we were headed towards war with that Islamic…

Usually when there's turmoil in the Middle East, you'll see a spike in the price of oil, but not this time. On June 15, the first day of trading since the public backlash in Iran began from what many are calling a fraudulent election, the price of oil has actually declined - after a rally over the past few weeks. But as CNBC's Jim Cramer pointed out on his June 15 "Stop Trading" segment on "…

For the last several months, New York Times reporter turned international columnist Roger Cohen has filed naïve apologist columns about Iran, often attacking Israel in the process. Previously mocked for this embarrassing display of Obama-mania in March 2008, Cohen attracted negative attention on the foreign affairs front earlier this year by telling readers how good things really were for Jews in…

If you are following the amazing events currently unfolding in Iran in the wake of their turbulent election, then YouTube will give you a much better sense of what is happening than the mainstream media. Yesterday, while the dramatic protests were unfolding, CNN held an extended forum on healthcare. The other cable news channels weren't much more enlightening in their coverage of events from Iran…

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann suggested that President Obama’s speech in Cairo may have been responsible for the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections which occurred a few days after the speech. But as Olbermann discussed the possibility that Obama had a hand in the results, he neglected to inform viewers that the apparent 71 out of 128 seats won by…

Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine reading a New York Times column not written by a conservative that claimed "the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism" in the Middle East "have a little wind at their backs" due to the policies of former President George W. Bush?Neither did I, but much to my surprise, such was said by Thomas Friedman in his most recent piece entitled "Winds of…

It must have been a while since David Gergen dropped his resume in the hopper for Team Obama, so it’s no small surprise that it was about for him to turn on the rhetorical firehose and gush some love the White House’s way. On the June 4 “Anderson Cooper 360,” Gergen was asked by the host to give his initial reaction to President Obama’s speech in Cairo. Gergen immediately mugged for the…

(Oops! "Ugly reality" already seems to have contradicted the naive premise of this Newsweek editor. See update below.)I'm not sure what's scarier: the fact that Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria wants us to believe that Iran seeks nuclear power only for peaceful purposes or that President Obama might be seriously buying into this guy's delusions by reading his book, The Post-American…

In honor of President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office, on Wednesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith decided to take an uncritical look at the President’s performance with liberal commentators Tavis Smiley of PBS and Fareed Zakaria of CNN and Newsweek. Smith asked Zakaria: "Using your book as a template, 'The Post-American World,' in which America is seen not necessarily as the…