Batchelor: Tehran Stooges Explain, Explain; Churchill Gone Painting

John Batchelor writes on his blog:

No Laugh Track

Tehran TV via LA source shows the Minister of Intelligence explaining to the Charlie Rose of the Twelvers how he is certain the election was not stolen by the regime he works for. Proof? Mullah Stooge says that if the ballots were phony, they would be all neat and pressed and flat, as if just out of the box. Mullah Stooge is adamant. Charlie Twelver Rose nods at this shrewd detail. Final frames on clip are shots of the boys recounting 10% of the ballots in order to demonstrate to the TV audience that all was well. Note how the ballots are flat and pressed and just out of the box. No laugh track, but the music is delightful.

Confessions Continue

The NYT, heretofore supporting POTUS aim to make a peace partner of Tehran, is boxed in to the necessity of reporting that the Twelvers are torturing prisoners (nothing as cruel as waterboarding, merely beatings, cigarette burns, and sleep deprivation and remarks about what happens to your family after you vanish) in order to make them confess on TV.

Confess What?

Confess that they were lured out of Iran to Velvet Revolution training seminars conducted by foreign powers in order to undermine the Revolution.

The confessions are said to be creative. The regime’s trendy web sites are the source:

Alef, a Web site of a conservative member of Parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully “welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos.”

This theater will drag on for weeks. The executions started already with a posse of so-called drug smugglers in the north of the country. One man’s drug smuggler is another man’s student leader. The regime is threatened. The putsch continues.

POTUS Keeps His Silence

The Obama administration has fallen silent, at least, hard to hear. The excuse may be that the White House does not want to trouble Tehran while British Foreign Secretary David Milliband is pleading for negotiations to rescue the abducted Iran nationals who were working in the British Embassy in Tehran until it was discovered by the mullahs that Old Blighty is a nest of spies.

POTUS must not speak out, because it may make the mullahs cranky, and the mullahs, when annoyed, sometimes take over embassies. For now, the mullahs look to be putting Hossein Rassam, 44, on trial. Milliband is hoping for talks. POTUS Obama is hoping for Milliband’s hoping.

What remains of the Obama administration policy with Tehran is incoherence inside ineptness wrapped in an Ace bandage. Again, there is no Plan B. If appeasement and surrender do not work, the Obama administration announces it is consulting with other powers and working to return to meaningful dialogue as soon as the smoke clears.

Yes, everyone in Europe is laughing. Within the first six months, the Obama administration has established itself as evasive, pompous, glass-jawed, timorous, unprepared, facile and harmless.

Churchill has quit the watchtower in Heaven and gone to paint more landscapes in Marrakech — that scene of the Atlas Mountains he loved so well he took FDR to see it in 1943, remember?