Jack & Jill Politics

I thought it said a lot about Obama that he really wanted to hear from Nico Pitney who’s been burnin’ it up on the HuffPo’s live blog on events in Iran. It was so hilarious watching all the old boy network roll their eyes and squirm in their seats as Obama called on Nico early in the press conference with a longish personal preamble — it’s clear that this was really important to Barack. I don’t buy that Obama isn’t sending a strong message to both the Iranian people and the Iranian government.

I also don’t buy John McCain as a legitimate and credible voice on what Barack Obama should and shouldn’t be doing in Iran. Isn’t this the same guy who sang “Bomb bomb bomb…bomb bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys tune? Here’s a flashback of Obama making McCain look stoopid around that in the first presidential debate. Rube. I don’t understand why the mainstream media has chosen Crazy McCain as their front man on this?!

From the HuffPo Iran Live Blog today:

HuffPost asks Obama a question about Iran at press conference. My colleague Nico Pitney was given the opportunity to ask a question at Obama’s press conference today that came directly from an Iranian. His question for the president was: “Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working toward?”

Obama’s response:

Well look, we didn’t have international observers on the ground, we can’t say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country. What we know is that a sizeable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, considered this election illegitimate. It’s not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There [are] significant questions about the legitimacy of the election. And so ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that’s why I’ve been very clear, ultimately this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government. What we can do is to say unequivocally that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent, that spans cultures, spans borders, and what we’ve been seeing over the Internet and what we’ve been seeing in news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.