Despair not, my friend, for the Shah, dead though he may be, has a son ready to restore irony to that wretched land. Pahlavi, Chalabi, and irony don't rhyme by accident, you know.

at this rate, by 2032 we'll have iran contra II : electric sandinista! and jenna/barbara will landslide their way into the white house!

the era of sequels to foreign policy disasters seems to be just beginning, and like any michael bay movie it promises plenty of explosions.

here's hoping none of us are hit with that scenario in addition to flood waters lapping at our doorsteps.

You make it sound like Bush should put in his CV (resume to most Americans) when his term ends.

"ignorant, insular, primitive culture" - sounds like some of the right wing Catholics I know in Texas, and particularly like the current bishop of San Antonio, who likes to describe himself in the "Opus Dei" manner - "a priest of Opus Dei" - to whom I wrote a letter asking if you are a priest of Opus Dei, how in the hell can you be a priest of God?

Never got an answer.

Today is primary election day in Texas - arise, ye cadavers, vote early, often and en masse!

Dang, whenever you do one of these historical parallels, it sends shivers down my spine.

OTH not everything is history repeating, to my knowledge we never had a president quite like Bush. Take comfort in that.

Ah TIME: that fiendish contraption of that well-meaning but ultimately dunderheaded American reactionary press baron Henry Luce.

I really have mixed feelings towards him as an Asian and a Chinese, he did attempt to support the Chinese Nationalist Cause against the Communist takeover, which as anyone could have told you was BAD in the short run, and in the long run produced results that could have been done otherwise anyway.

But still, his magazine ain't worth reading at all.

These days we have much worse to worry about than these old time reactionary press barons informed by misguided missionary visions: that is, reactionary press conglomerates informed by well-investigated profit margins.

Make "neighboring lands' into foreign lands and this sounds just like the Preznit.

So Mossadegh was filled with a hatred "almost incomprehensible to the West."
Compared to the hatred of Stalin (anybody), Hitler (Jews) and Jackson (Indians)?
What did Mossadegh do, compared to them?
Must have been that voice.

Pahlavi, Chalabi, and irony don't rhyme by accident, you know.

Ouch.

I thought, at first, that it was a description of either Bush or Stalin. I forget sometimes that Iran had themselves a democracy for a little while.

On NPR yesterday, a Middle East expert said that due to the almost total lack of power of the Iranian presidency, Pat Robertson has more influence on American foreign policy than the Iranian president has on Iran's. Obviously that's never going to fly with the masses, though, because the idea of a figurehead president, with other people actually calling all the shots, would be incomprehensible to most Americans.