The punter's lament

We was robbed has been the cry of the losing punter from time immemorial but I've no one to blame but myself. There I was on Friday putting my hard earned on the people of Iran throwing out a President without paying any regard to the possibility of a non-elected Ayatollah being just as likely to rig an election count as any other authoritarian ruler.
Evidence of an electoral rort is not easy to find at this distance but the views of the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof I summarised in this morning's Breakfast Media Wrap make a compelling argument. Ahmadinejad’s victory, he wrote, looks extraordinarily suspicious.
If he won by that margin, he would be the most popular Iranian president ever - which he certainly isn’t. And it seems exceptionally unlikely that he won in Moussavi’s hometown, as the government claims. That’s the problem with dictators - they don’t just try to steal a squeaker of an election, they try to steal a landslide. In the process they lose plausibility and legitimacy.
I notice too that the Al Jazeera website has chosen to put quotation marks around the word "victory".

It is not just sore losers and Americans who are sceptical. Iranians are too as this moving account in The Independent tells:

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