Talk about a stolen election.

“TEHRAN — The Iranian government declared an outright election victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday morning, and riot police officers clamped down on a growing demonstration by supporters of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who insisted that the election had been stolen.

After a mostly quiet morning in Tehran, thousands of Moussavi supporters began filtering onto the streets. By early afternoon, thousands had come together, many of them wearing the characteristic green of his campaign, chanted angrily that they would fight on, as Mr. Moussavi had urged them to do on Friday night when he claimed that he had won that there had been voting “irregularities.”

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back.”

The US is calling the results “not” credible, as it’s hard to believe that Moussavi would lose the popular vote in his own hometown.

However it’s important to realize that the election was rigged no matter who won. At the Times Online UK we learn that the whole election was really only a play that blew up in the Guardian Council’s face:

“Iran’s presidential election was not supposed to be like this – days (and nights) of giddy excitement and political mudslinging and anarchic scenes of a sort that the tightly-controlled Islamic republic has not seen since the revolution.

It was meant to be a formality. The Guardian Council, a body of senior conservative clerics, would select a handful of candidates with impeccable Islamic and revolutionary credentials. The country would go through the motions of democracy to impress the outside world and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would duly be re-elected, as every other incumbent president has in the republic’s 30-year history.

How could the Israel-hating, US-bashing, nuclear weapon-chasing President lose when he was backed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, by the Revolutionary Guard and its volunteer Basij militia, by state-controlled television and a nationwide government machine?”

Easy, the people. If this was an experiment in democracy, they forgot the most important ingredient – the people.

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