Ahmadinejad won, get over it!

Many in the West may agree that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an unpleasant politician with a rhetorical tendency to bluster about Iran's power and to foolishly question the historical accuracy of the Holocaust, but that doesn't answer the crucial question of whether he was democratically reelected. Despite what you may have read in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the available evidence is that Ahmadinejad did win last June's presidential election and that efforts–embraced by nearly the entire U.S. news media–to oust him amount to yet another case of seeking the removal of a democratically chosen leader. Though widely ignored by the major American news media, a recent study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found little evidence to support allegations of fraud, nor to conclude that most Iranians view President Ahmadinejad as illegitimate.