[Sean]

Originally Posted by cacophony

i think if we were talking apples and apples, meaning the scale of the protests were the same and a minority of people were lighting things on fire and smashing things our gov't would send in the national guard behind beefed up police forces.

Probably so.

Originally Posted by cacophony

i also think that under GWB's watch protesters would have disappeared, charged with violations of the patriot act, which makes it legal for the gov't to hold you indefinitely and makes it illegal for you to discuss the terms of your detainment.

While this is a possibility, would you put it on a comparable level to what's happening in Iran now? Reporters Without Borders' count puts the number of detained reporters since the election in Iran at 34, supposedly 70 professors were detained for having met with Mousavi (although the source on this is Mousavi himself, so we can take that with a grain of salt), along with estimates of hundreds of protesters who have been detained - and it's probably fair to say that a fair number of them weren't detained due to their violent behavior.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find any example of comparable, contemporary stories here in the States, despite the obvious, troubling faults in the Patriot Act. And that can probably be largely attributed to the fact that while we have surely been subject to election fraud here, it's not been as big and blatant as what appears to have happened in Iran to spark these protests. So there's yet another difference

Originally Posted by cacophony

i'm just mulling it over in my head but it feels like we're very outraged at the iranian gov't and just a few years ago we lived with an administration that would have been happy to do the same.

I've never been on board with attributing this level of maliciousness to the Bush administration. Inept and wrong-headed, yes. Dancing on the line of heading in this direction, quite possibly. But actually saying they would've been "happy to do the same"? No.

Originally Posted by cacophony

on the other hand, i feel like the cantankerous nature of the legislative and judicial branches and that "checks and balances" concept makes it unlikely that the clamp-down would go unpunished. but then...... a lot of things went unpunished under GWB, and will likely never be made right.

And there's yet another crucial difference between the situations here and there. In Iran, the checks and balances come down to the Ayatollah and the clerical assembly that undemocratically selects him and has the power to replace him at will.

Originally Posted by cacophony

i don't know. it's so hard to know how accurate any of the reporting is from iran.

That alone highlights a world of difference if we're focussing on how comparable the situations would be. The blatant suppression of the press began before the results of the election were even available. The Bush administration (and Republican party in general) was certainly no fan of or supporter of the U.S. press, but this kind of suppression would simply not be tolerated here.

Originally Posted by cacophony

it's all anecdotal self-reporitng from those few people who can get footage out of the country. an analysis of the twitter "revolution" showed that it was actually just a handful of people tweeting about the situation and a lot of other people re-tweeting or talking about the original posts. it's hard to get a clear view of what exactly is going on.

Even if the "twitter revolution" wasn't as big as once thought, it's extremely telling that it, along with eyewitness accounts through various other sources, is our only source of information out of the country aside from state sponsored news that showed only celebrations for a victorious Ahmadinejad. Even his opponent Mousavi's own newspaper has been shut down by the government.

Originally Posted by cacophony

people can't even agree whether neda was a protestor, a bystander, if she was shot by cops, or by a sniper.

Well, Iran's government claims it was some separatist group who shot her with the intent of blaming the government. So far, the Iranian government's been trying to shift the blame for everything they've done to someone else, and there's no reason for me to think the same isn't happening here. And yet again, the difficulty in getting any information out of the country thanks to government crackdowns is probably largely to blame for our inability to get clear answers about her shooting.

And all that being said, when things tipped too far to the right, we went ahead and elected a Democratic black man named Barack Hussein Obama to take the reigns.

To me, when the differences in every point raised are so glaring and easily illustrated, I find it impossible to claim any significant similarities between the situations.