The Onion has fooled many with its fake news stories. Now it has caught its biggest fish yet: the official Iranian news agency, Fars.
Fars reported as fact an Onion spoof about a fake Gallup poll that found that 77 percent of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Obama. The Fars story included The Onion‘s fake quote from a West Virginia resident who purportedly said the Iranian leader “takes national defence seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does”.
F
ars has apologized for its blunder, but I think its apology tells us something more significant about Iran than the fact that Fars was initially duped by The Onion. In the apology, the Fars editor-in-chief said: “Although it does not justify our mistake, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen.”
If the head of the official Iranian news agency truly believes that Americans would prefer a hateful, repressive, anti-Semitic figure like Ahmadinejad to our own President, there is a huge gulf in understanding between our two countries. When those two countries are jousting about Iran’s reckless efforts to obtain nuclear capabilities, such a lack of understanding can be extremely dangerous. If Iranians think it is plausible that rural Americans would vote for an intolerant, deluded bigot like Ahmadinejad, what are they thinking about President Obama’s warning, in his recent speech to the United Nations, that the United States “will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.“ Are they taking that warning seriously, or are they kidding themselves about that, too?
A recent news story, however, may help to rehabilitate Barbie’s reputation. It turns out that 
At this point, no one knows what Iraq’s future is — or whether America’s intervention in the affairs of that sovereign nation was beneficial or harmful, stabilizing or destabilizing, a game-changer or a waste of blood and treasure. We know that America succeeded in overthrowing a murderous dictator and, after years of hard fighting and many American casualties, helped to establish a relatively peaceful democratic government in the vast, totalitarian expanse of the Middle East. The question is the staying power of Iraq and its current government, and whether it can maintain order for long enough for democratic institutions to truly take root. It will be years before the answers to those questions become clear.
The reality is that urging “tough” United Nations resolutions doesn’t mean much in the face of guns and mercenaries. And saying that a foreign leader should leave doesn’t mean much, either. The days when pronouncements of American presidents left people quaking in their boots are long since over. If there is no resolve to take actions, words ring hollow — but even meaningless words and lack of action nevertheless can have negative consequences.
With popular protests having brought down the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, the wave of demonstrations for democracy is sweeping on to other countries in the region. We are seeing 
Egypt’s economy is mired in high unemployment with low wages, and the masses have followed the lead of Tunisia and taken to the streets against an unpopular leader. Mubarak, 
I am sure that the realpolitick types in American government would prefer Mubarak to the unknown that might occur if he were deposed. It is possible, of course, that elections could produce a fundamentalist Islamic regime that is hostile to Israel and the Mideast peace process. Yet too much American support for Mubarak could quash American influence with a successor government if he ultimately is deposed. Iran may be a model here. America’s steadfast support for the Shah of Iran until the bitter end left America with no real influence when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over, and American and Iran have been estranged ever since — to the detriment of geopolitics in the Middle East.
My real point in bringing up the mosque issue, however, is to urge people to move on, already! Our country is wrestling with high unemployment and a persistent economic recession that has thrown many Americans out of work and out of their homes. Our soldiers are in harm’s way in two faraway foreign lands. We are facing a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran that is governed by a madman. We have a government that has racked up crushing budget deficits and is doing nothing about them.
