Sunday, June 28, 2009, 11:51 AM
In the News, Stop the Presses
By Kevin Moreau
Iran, so far away
When your top politician goes by the handle of “Supreme Leader,” you probably shouldn’t be too surprised when he acts like a supervillian from a third-rate Saturday morning cartoon.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest-ranking political and religious figure, may not cackle maniacally as he hatches intricate schemes of world domination. But when faced with the news that the Iranian people aren’t going to just roll over and play dead, he stammers in theatrical disbelief like Megatron getting the business end of a beatdown from Optimus Prime in a creaky “Transformers” episode.
Unable to accept reality—that Iran doesn’t want another term under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the oily George W. to his haughty Dick Cheney—Khamenei simply creates his own. He stabs an angry finger at the West, accusing the U.S. and Britain of sewing unrest, while his henchman, Ahmadinejad, chastises President Obama for “interfering in Iran’s affairs.” They sound like the villain of the week in those dreadful “Scooby-Doo” cartoons, angrily sputtering, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids—and that damn dog!”
If the people of Iran are fed up with a puppet president and his puppetmaster—with their fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters arrested, jailed, shot at and killed for speaking their minds—well, whose fault is that?
The Iranian election and its bloody aftermath hadn’t yet taken place when News Editor Stephanie Ramage and I first discussed exploring a Bill of Rights for Atlantans for the June 28 issue of The Sunday Paper, preceding the Fourth of July weekend. But the plight of the Iranian people these last two weeks has served as a stark reminder of the rights we, and our leaders, sometimes take for granted.
I wouldn’t be so sophomoric as to compare Atlanta’s leadership with that of Iran. But with people a world away dying for freedoms we enjoy every day, and our nation’s birthday around the corner, there’s no better time to take stock of what exactly we, and all Americans, can and should expect from the leaders we elect to serve us.