The 3AM call to the White House

The 3AM call to the White House just went to voice mail. [Link]

The White House has not issued a statement expressing support for the protestors declaring the election illegitimate. But neither has anyone in the Obama administration said a public word accepting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection.

"We're reacting to concrete facts," a White House official tells ABC News. "We're collecting them still."

Where is the voice of the Nation? [Link]

Some argue that the brave Iranians demonstrating for freedom and democracy would be better off if the American president somehow stayed out of the fight. Really? But Barack Obama is president. His statement wouldn’t be crafted by those dreaded neocons who vulgarly thought all people would like a chance to govern themselves and deserved some modicum of U.S. support in that endeavor. It would be written by subtle liberal internationalists, who would get the pitch and tone just right. And the statement wouldn’t be delivered by the notorious George Bush (who did, however, weigh in usefully in somewhat similar situations in Ukraine and Lebanon). It would be delivered by the popular and credible speaker-to-the-Muslim-world, Barack Obama. Does anyone really think that a strong Obama statement of solidarity with the Iranian people, and a strong rebuke to those who steal elections and shoot demonstrators, wouldn’t help the dissidents in Iran?

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe Barack Obama believes it. As he put it in The Audacity of Hope: “We can inspire and invite other people to assert their freedoms;...we can speak out on behalf of local leaders whose rights are violated; and we can apply economic and diplomatic pressure to those who repeatedly violate the rights of their own people.”

This makes President Obama’s silence over the weekend and so far today about Iran all the more puzzling. So if I may be presumptuous, I say to President Obama: Speak out. Speak out multilaterally and carefully and sensitively. Speak out kindly and gently. But speak out. Speak for liberty. Speak for America.

The mainstream news media seem to have been caught flat-footed. CNN didn't even cover it over the weekend. It has spawned the term '#cnnfail' on Twitter, which has become a real source for as-it-happens news. [Link]

As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran--thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities--an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: "CNNFail."

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes--nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran--reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

"The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government," The New York Times cited senior officials as having said Saturday, "despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Yet even as word of the urban strife, seemingly led by those posting to Twitter, spread next around the world on news networks like the BBC, NPR, and the Times, CNN remained mostly mute. Even when the network's Internet site finally posted a story late Saturday, the network's first "story highlight" was, "Ahmadinejad plans rally after winning second presidential term."

Lots of updates here. [Link]

Our government speaks finally. And what did they have to say? [Link]

On Saturday, the White House was merely “monitoring” the situation, press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement. On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden said he had “doubts” about the election. And on Monday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the U.S. is “deeply troubled” by events in Iran but stopped short of condemning them.

“I haven’t used that word, ‘condemn,’” he told the State Department press corps. “We need to see how things unfold.”

“You need to see more heads cracked in the middle of the street?” Fox News’ James Rosen shot back.

“We need a deeper assessment of what’s going on,” Kelly said.

Earlier in the briefing, though, Kelly gave clearer expression to the administration’s dilemma: “We have to look at our own national interest too — nonproliferation is a very important priority in this administration,” he said.

Further complicating matters, the State Department found itself yesterday refusing to confirm or deny word — which one official later confirmed — that the department’s top Iran hand, Dennis Ross, would be moving to the White House’s National Security Council, a move whose implications for American policy remain unclear.

The Iranian turmoil has exposed a central conflict in Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama’s core message of democracy and change dovetails with the hopes of Iranian reformers, and even the tech-friendly, youth-driven style of the uprising in Tehran echoes the American president’s own campaign.

But Obama also was elected on a promise to tone down America’s moralizing rhetoric, and his foreign policy may owe as much to unromantic old realists such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski as it does to the hopes of a new generation in Iran.

Ah yes, such moralizing rhetoric such as "don't kill your citizens" and "honor election results". I am so glad we are beyond such naive and childish concepts such as freedom and liberty.