Still wondering if Iran is a dictatorship?
As reported by AP via ABC News, Iran's Council of Guardians in their infinite and self-apparent wisdom, have authorized six candidates out of 1,010 potentials to run for the presidency. As the article correctly notes, anyone with even a twinkling of reformism was banned by the Council and I think that even the most gullible naive observers of the Iranian political system are going to have to call the establishment reformist movement dead. Myself, I've been ready to publish its obituary for quite sometime now ever since it became abundantly clear to me that the real power in the Islamic Republic never had any intention of allowing even Gorbachev-style reforms. As Joe has noted time and time again, Khatami behaved like nothing less than a labor boss who'd been bought off by the mob.
And get this description of Rafsanjani by the AP:
The approved candidates included powerful former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who moves frequently between the hard-line and more moderate camps and was seen as a front-runner in the race.
Yeah, he's a regular "maverick" like John McCain. That's why they call him "the Shark" ...
Prediction: The new "European" line will soon be that Rafsanjani is really a mushy moderate at heart and that only by "engaging" with him can we hope to offset the real hardliners ...
Now I'm sure that more "nuanced, reality-based" individuals than I will point out that the hardliners, a term I think is more or less synonymous at this point with the Iranian political establishment, have all manner of differences and disagreements as to how to proceed. This is quite true, but the problem that many do not seem to properly grasp is that nobody in this potential crop of Iranian presidential candidates has anything resembling a pro-American outlook. The Council has stacked the deck so as to ensure that all of the major candidates share their preferred worldview as far as the Great Satan is concerned.
If there is any good news in this development, it's that the Council wasn't confident enough in the hardliners' ability to bribe, argue, or cajole the general population to even allow some Khatami-esque token reformists in the running, which goes back to the general unpopularity of the entire Iranian regime as a whole.
Faster, please.
The Rafsanjani's make the Medicis look like amateurs, except the Medicis earned their fortune; the Rafsanjani's swiped theirs during the revolution. Hashemi is no Islamist, that is true (except for political expediency), he is a Persian chauvanist pure and simple. And, a snake in the grass.