Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The Blogger ?

It’s nearly impossible to be surprised by political hypocrisy on any level these days, particularly when you are talking about iron-fisted rulers of countries like Iran. But still, this is sort of funny, in an Onion headline sort of way: Apparently, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran has a blog.

The WSJ reported yesterday that Ahmadinejad spends 15 minutes a week updating “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Personal Memos” where he “he goes to vent and stay in touch with the common folk.” On the one hand this is particularly galling considering Iran’s treatment of reporters and bloggers and its vicious crackdown on protesters last June who were desperately attempting to reach the world with news of what was happening through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, is it really a surprise? Of course a man desperate to control his own message is on the Internet. Next we’ll discover he’s also on Twitter. In fact some of his recent UN statements strike as very Twitterable, though perhaps not in the tone intended.

Anyway, according to the WSJ the Farsi version of the blog has not one negative comment on it (the fact it allows comments at all is sort of amazing), no doubt Ahmadinejad either employs strict comment monitors or people are just too scared to say what they really think. The English-language version(!) apparently has plenty, though as of this morning I couldn’t access so maybe its servers were unable to handle the excess attention. Stay tuned.

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