Some Republicans playing disingenuous politics on the Iran election issue

[BirminghamExaminer]

Most Americans agree that the outcome of the June12, 2009 presidential election held in Iran is fraudulent and Americans are watching as the subsequent protests by Iranian reformists led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, former prime minister of Iran, unfold.

There has been an air of excitement as Iranians upload hard to come by video images from protests in the streets of Tehran. The Iranian government has not been successful in eliminating all communications of the events to the outside world.

As Americans watch with interest and with empathy, President Obama has expressed concern for the safety of the Iranian protestors but has stopped short of calling the election fraudulent. Senator Lugar (R) of Indiana agrees that the president is following a prudent course. Republican Pat Buchanan says President Obama "has it right.. He's behaving not as a politician but as president of the United States."

But other Republicans are not so sincere in their appraisal of the President's handling of the situation in Iran.

Senator John McCain (R), Arizona whose singing foible from 2007, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" is hard to forget, chastised President Obama.

The president should speak out that this election is flawed, it is wrong, it's a deprivation of the Iranian people of their basic human rights. He should speak out that this is a corrupt flawed sham of an election. The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights. We support them in this struggle against a repressive, oppressive regime and they should not be subjected to four more years of Ahmadinejad."

It's true that the election is flawed. But McCain's concern about the human rights of the Iranians he so cavalierly sang about bombing just last year reek of poltical tap-dancing.

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R), Georgia said,

We are a beacon of hope for freedom and democracy around the world and one thing we've always stood for is free and open elections...For the United States President to be silent on this while other leaders are speaking out I think puts us in a position of well, we're just going to go along with whoever gets elected over there, that's just not right. It's critically important that America speak with a loud and clear voice in support of free, open democratic elections."

The irony of Chambliss saying America supports free, open elections is disturbing considering the depths to which he stooped to win an election in 2002 against Max Cleland. Chambliss invokes the patriotic American ideal of being a "beacon of hope for freedom and democracy" but the ideal doesn't play well after the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that resulted from America's invasion.

America's 'beacon of hope for freedom and democracy' is a tenuous ideal when America has detained war prisoners without access to lawyers or trials and tortured many of them. Though water boarding has been the focus of the torture debate in recent months, other methods of torture were employed against many more prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Read the entire sordid truth here.