Cool doings in Iran

I'm seeing wire reports that say Ahmadinejad's nets are doing poorly in both local elections and one for "college of cardinals"-type body expected to pick current ailing ayatollah's successor, where supposedly the ex-pres (must be Rafsanjani)) is leading the vote.

If all that end's up being true, that's stunning. Imagine John Kerry winning a national election in 2006 to be the new Supreme Court Chief Justice.

So to me, this is like Ahmadinejad suffering a very humbling mid-term election.

Be clear on this point too: what's unfolding in the clerics' council isn't the will of anybody but the mullahs on top, who want Ahmadinejad reined him for all his elaborate foolishness that clouds their truly seriously pursuit of a nuclear shield against U.S. Military attack.

A while back TM Lutas said this election would signal Ahmadinejad's power, and I countered that it would really show the desire of his opponents to stop him. I thought that was a good comeback at the time (TM brings this out in me), but at the time I feared TM was far closer to the truth. I am greatly pleased to find otherwise.

To me, this election offers Bush a huge opportunity, so well-timed by the ISG report, to push the Mideast pile very differently, vis-a-vis Iran, and I mean a once-in-lifetime chance to reshape a region (his original dream going in).

And that's--more than anything--what saddens me about this administration: it started that amazing Big Bang, getting so much going (and so confounding the experts in the process) and THEN Bush-Cheney went braindead on Iran, rerunning the whole WMD dynamic, apparently because it worked so well the first time with Iraq.

But here fate intervenes more than Bush deserves, by delivering unto us a leader whose exceeding (and unthinking) brashness now rivals Bush's own exceeding (and unthinking) stubbornness.

All good things to optimists who wait.

As so often is the case in this business, just when someone declares the "end," it ends up just being the beginning.