What If John McCain Were President Today?

A good example of the bullet we dodged last November by electing Barack Obama was made very evident by the public grandstanding of John McCain in his reaction to the Election Violence in Iran.

Yesterday on Fox News, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called the Iranian election a “sham” and said that he hopes the U.S. “will act.” President Obama said that he would refrain from weighing in. “[We] want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football,” he said. Today, McCain responded, calling on Obama to turn up his rhetoric. “He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election and that the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights,” he said. But this morning on CBS, McCain’s Senate GOP colleague and Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) sided with Obama:

HARRY SMITH: Beyond watching…beyond supporting the idea that these disputed votes should be recounted, is there anything the United States can do?

LUGAR: No. I think for the moment our position is to allow the Iranians to work out their situation. When popular revolutions occur, they come really from the people. They’re generated by people power within the country. For us to become heavily involved in the election at this point is to give the clergy an opportunity to have an enemy…and to use us, really, to retain their power.

In other words, McCain wants to repeat the history of meddling and rhetoric which empowered the Iranian Hardliners in the first place.
Obama said it best when he said to the Iranian people in his statements, "The Whole World Is watching!"
Lugar sums it up in his statement. This is a liquid situation. For American politicians to try to score cheap public points with hard line rhetoric is asking to have the blood of the repression of the protestors on their hands.
If the Iranian people feel that they are being influenced and pushed into a revolution by the United States, it is inevitable that the opposite will occur.

The horror of the alternate history that we would be living if John McCain had been elected president has never been more apparent.