The Guardian’s Abbas Barzegar starts us off by refuting Western punditry, of both conservative and liberal stripes, including vaunted expert Juan Cole.
He says, rather Western pundits engaged in wishful thinking to the degree the Western press largely didn’t even report on the size of Ahmadinejad’s biggest rallies, including one that may have hit 1 million people.
The Guardian piece pretty well refutes, or claims to, all of Cole’s claims of fraud. (Cole had been awfully right on a lot of things in the past, but, when he's wrong, he can be wayyy wrong.)
As for Ahmadinejad’s claiming victory relatively soon after the polls closed, and with a percentage of the vote fairly near what he actually got, contra one of Cole’s commenters, I assume he has pollsters, like American presidential candidates, and they did their jobs about as well. It happens every four years here in the US and nobody cries “fraud.”
Sullivan is also wrong in claiming a straight-line vote return indicates fraud; liberal vote-analyst blogger Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight shows that with illustrations from American elections.
Sullivan is also wrong in claiming a straight-line vote return indicates fraud; liberal vote-analyst blogger Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight shows that with illustrations from American elections.
Beyond that, maybe this is similar to Hamas winning Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. Perhaps a lot of fence-sitting Iranians saw a chance to say Eff You to Western pundits and analysts.
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