The irony, my god the irony, so dense and thick it practically drops through the earths’ crust and heads straight for the core; that injured anti-administration protesters in the streets of Tehran are being encouraged to take shelter in various foreign embassies. And I daresay that ours would have been one of them, that is, if we still had a functioning embassy in the Iranian capital. And always assuming that our State Department would have grown a pair and decided to do the decent thing – always a bit of a stretch as far as Foggy Bottom is concerned, admittedly.

One gathers that it’s not that any of those who were running for office in the contested Iranian election were expected to be much of an improvement – just the best of a bad lot, and maybe someone just a little bit less worst. And one way and another the same-old-same-old ritual shouts of ‘death to America, death to the Jews’ and sadly, the funding of Islamic militants like Hezbollah would continue without much diminution, regardless of who among the mullahs was really in charge.

That being said, it’s hard to watch some of the video, and read some of the tweets, emails and blog-posts filtering out of Iran and not feel some sort of instinctive sympathy for the outrage of citizens, upon seeing an election being casually, openly stolen, and having their very understandable outrage and objections over this unfortunate turn of events being dismissed by a grubby little thug, essentially saying: “I won.” (The corollary being, “You’d better sit down and shut up about it, you unpatriotic and ignorant little gits – we know what is best for you!) And then, adding injury to insult, to be set upon – once again – by foreign bullies with clubs … well, as I said, the irony of it all. And not just that particular irony, but that word and image of this is filtering out through cellphones and twitter, through email and all the rest of the electronic volunteer citizen’s media … not with press releases and statements from the usual suspects, and press conferences where the usual anointed spokesperson stand up in front of the anointed and properly gilded media representatives (oops, I nearly said gelded… well, that’s what living in Texas will do to you, straight to the biological, domesticated-animal comparisons). The spontaneous, real-time, real-life video is heartbreaking; the evidence of what happens when citizens reach their limit and are pushed beyond it … yes, the bad little lizard part of my brain is wondering what would happen if the penalties for loudly protesting in the streets (or on the sidewalks of the city) involved out-of-town thugs with clubs and permission to beat the heck out of whomever they feel like beating up.

And what if it began to happen here?