Reza Aslan discusses the Iranian election with Washington Times reporter Eli Lake and makes a rather startling assertion -- that Iran's electoral system provides "greater diversity of religious and political thought" than the American electoral system. The bizarre praise for Iranian democracy comes in the segment below, which includes Aslan offering an elaborate rebuttal to those who would criticize the Iranian regime for hand-picking the candidates that can run in the presidential election:
ASLAN: Yeah, but I need to clarify one thing because you hear this from westerners all the time about how yes but the candidates are vetted, yes but the candidates are vetted. Yeah, it's true they are vetted, the Council of Guardians decide who is qualified to run for president and who isn't qualified to run for president. And yes they do, as Donald Rumsfeld very famously said in 2005, they do disqualify 90 percent of people who run for president. That's because 1,000 people ran for president in 2005.
LAKE: Oh please.
ASLAN: The Iranian constitution allows anyone to run, homeless people ran, people from insane asylums ran and, yes, of course, their decisions are politically motivated. They're not going to allow someone to run that is challenging the very foundation of the Islamic Republic any more than we'd allow a communist to go into a debate with the Republican and the Democratic nominees here.
Aslan would go on to say that the 2005 Iranian election offered "greater diversity of religious and political thought than any two people, any Republican or Democrat that I can remember." And when Lake pointed out that there was no filtering mechanism in the American political system that prevented candidates the government deems unacceptable from running, Aslan retorted (as any lefty would) that "We have our own filtering device here. It's called money."
This view is, presumably, not widely shared on the left, which may have had some illusions about Iranian democracy before Friday but seems now to be fairly clear-eyed about the true nature of that regime. But Aslan's unseemly support for the Iranian system does not come from some marginal figure. At the end of the discussion comes this exchange regarding rumors that Aslan might be headed to the NSC:
LAKE: Are you maybe going to the White House.
ASLAN: I can't talk about that.
Anyone who believes that the Iranian electoral system, what with all the homeless people and insane people it weeds out, offers voters a greater range of choices than our democracy really ought to be automatically disqualified from a job at the White House.
