All that said, Ahmadinejad is an authoritarian who isn't in support of things the majority of Iranians want. Such as the right to vote for the Supreme Leader instead of the holder of that post being dictated to the population. Mousavi doesn't support this either however.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of recognition in the Western press of the internal dynamics of Iran. This election is being written about as the people vs the government. This is how US politics is often written about to and that version of events is often a smokescreen for ruling class fights. What are the dynamics of the Iranian ruling class? What are their interests in these matters? The NYTimes hasn't made that a central point in their analysis and that is worrisome.

And finally, I have read that polls indicate only a third of Iranians have internet access. I would assume that this is the upper class layers of the population. It is known that Ahmadinejad has done significant wealth redistribution. This is never popular in countries with significant class divides. Therefore, to see lots of anti-Ahmadinejad information coming out of Iran on the net is predictable and because of the digital divide that exists there, not a good litmus for judging what is actually happening on the ground. Unfortunately, most folks outside Iran depend on the net for information on the situation. And in this case, as in many cases, the net opinions will have a very high class bias and the class realities of this political situation must be honestly taken into account and not simply dismissed as most seem to be doing.

Here in the US, liberal political discussion is dominated by the middle and upper-middle class that has easy and frequent internet access. Those liberals are far more conservative than those with less wealth and less access to the discussion. If you were to only watch the US political discussion by way of the internet you would have a very biased and inaccurate view of the political situation here. You would likely not understand the political views of Black, Latin or poor Americans generally because of the way the digital divide acts as an economic censor to so many millions of political voices.

As a Black person in the US I understand this dynamic quite intimately and am very wary of the political narrative we are being fed in regards to Iran. I don't feel that the net saavy student movement in Iran represents the masses of poor people at all. Because they are young and using twitter, the story appeals to naive whites here in the US but it really doesn't make sense that this would be the group representative of the popular base in Iran. They are college students with far more resources than it appears most of the population.

My point in all of this is that we need to be far more discriminating about information coming out of Iran and use our common sense (which apparently is all too uncommon in the West).