Meatstick Opinion: What To Do When You Hear Someone 'Quote' Iran's President

I will start this thread by saying that I am in no way defending Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The guy is a complete ass.

What I will say is that I do not believe in taking advantage of language gaps by misquoting and spinning quotes from Ahmadinejad. This is what Republicans love to do.

For example, I had the chance to sit down for a bit and watch the Patreaus debacle from the live stream on cspan.com. For the first time in my life I was looking at my computer hoping that Comcast's shitty service would knock out my internet. Senator/Comedian James Inhofe (R-OK) started off his ten minutes of questioning by droning on and on about the influence of Iran in Iraq. He was all proud of himself for finding a recent quote by Ahmadinejad. Inhofe said,

"Ahmadinejad recently stated, 'Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap.'"

Yes, Mr. Inhofe. Ahmadinejad did, in fact, make that statement. However, it was part of a longer quote. A quote that you decided cut in half because you didn't like the rest of the quote. Here is the entire quote from Ahmadinejad:

“Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation.”

Mr. Inhofe left off the entire last part of the quote because it allowed him to spin the quote to make him look like a hotshot in front of GEN Petreaus. In reality, it sounds like Ahmadinejad wants to bring in the various parties in the region to help his own cause. Sounds a bit like what we have been trying to do the last 4 years.

You will also hear the misinformed claim that Ahmadinejad proclaimed, "We need to wipe Israel off the face of the map." This is one of their favorite quotes to sing while beating the drums of war with Iran. When you hear someone make this claim can you please instruct them that "face of the map" is an English phrase. This is what he actually said in Farsi:

Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

Basically, he said, "Khomeini said this occupying regime in Israel must be vanished from the page of time." This quote takes on much different meaning than the version we so often hear. The misquote is used to scare people into thinking that Iran is developing nuclear weapons so that they can bomb Israel off the face of the map.

I realize that not everyone has the benefit of being surrounded by fluent Persian speakers, like I do (commence wiretapping), but this information can be found other places. For those of you that don't believe my Persian sources...figure out the shit for yourself here.

We've already been persuaded into one war based on misinformation and false pretenses. Please don't let it happen again.

Meatstick Opinion: Draft College Republicans (part 2)

President Bush was in the Seattle area for about 2 hours yesterday. A video of the event can be found on Komo 4's website. The video is pretty much what you would expect of any presidential visit. It shows Air Force One screwing up the flights for the day, the motorcade blocking traffic during rush hour on some of the busiest highways in America, and Bush telling a crowd of his most loyal fans that, "we need to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

Of course, the video also shows the hundred or so protesters that were there from the time he arrived until well after he was gone. There were also a few Bush supporters in the crowd outside the hotel. These must be Bush's poor fans because they didn't pay the $1,000-$10,000 to see him speak inside the hotel. One of these poor fans was a kid named Timothy. I only know his name because they put it up on the TV screen during his interview. Mr. Timothy had the nerve to make the following statement in regards to the protesters:

"They're saying this an illegal war and innocent people are dying. Not that many people have died compared to World War I, or World War II, or Vietnam."

Holy shit. I had to take a few deep breathes so that I didn't throw my remote control across the room. College football season is coming up, I need my remote control.

A quick myspace search of Timothy reveals that he is an even more hurting than his interview on TV made him out to be. His profile picture, found here, shows him holding a sign that reads, "US out of Iraq and Into Iran." Of course, Timmy doesn't list any military experience in his profile. He appears to be one of the many college aged Republicans who would rather spend their time at protests rather than actually helping us win the "war on terror."

In the meantime, forty minutes down the road at Fort Lewis, there was a memorial held for 2 Special Forces soldiers killed in Iraq this week. I guess that wasn't an important enough event for George Bush and Timmy to attend.