If there's an anti-democratic organization or movement anywhere, an individual dictator or a tyrannical regime, then it's a safer than safe bet, because it's a certainty, that somewhere or other a commentator on the Western left (verkrappt section) will be telling you that the said organization or movement, dictator or regime, isn't as bad as all that. And it's a near certainty that one of the somewheres he or she will be telling you this is in the Guardian. You don't need three guesses, you need only one; it's Seumas Milne:
[A] similar misreading of their own social circles for the country [Iran] at large appears to have convinced the opposition's supporters that it can only have lost last Friday's election through fraud.
That is also reflected in the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad.
Ahmadinejad not just a Holocaust-denying fanatic but a patriot and friend of the poor - so don't be so hard on the guy. And don't you just love that belittling 'Tehran's gilded youth'? A diagnosis of the mind-set is here.
Another big thing for Milne, as he goes on to explain, is that the regime in Iran is a central obstacle to the evil hegemony run from Washington DC. This has to be a clincher when you're left verkrappt. Doesn't matter the nature of the obstacle, or the hopes and the freedoms which it thwarts; because, hey, it's an obstacle. As the man once said: 'tak[ing] a stand alongside the scum of this earth'.
Footnote. With regard to 'gilded youth', Milne is the 'younger son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne [and] attended the leading public school Winchester College and read PPE at Balliol College, Oxford'.