Conveniently for some, Mohammad Asgari, an information technology official inside Iran's Interior Ministry and apparently the source of leaked data purporting to show election fraud, was killed in a "suspicious" car accident. It is difficult not to indulge in conspiracy theorism in such cases. And sometimes conspiracy theorism manages to do quite well. Let's hope this is not one such.

Iran has its work cut out for it. Unfortunately, even daunting protests do not always carry the day against entrenched statist regimes. China has managed to escape almost entirely unscathed almost exactly ten years after Tiananmen while the leaders and middle management of the 1989 movement suffered bitterly thereafter. Like a global economic player, an isolated state already familiar with sanction regimes has very little to lose by brutally repressing its population when they get uppity. Even success might mean little over the long run. Expectations that regime change in Iran will necessarily result in a budding democracy or a free market economy are, to put it mildly, courting disappointment.

Even so, it is entertaining to watch the State Department flail about uselessly like some sort of twitching invertebrate out of water, unable even to latch on to Twitter's fifteen minutes to assert some sort of international agency in the face of increasingly obvious, even embarrassing irrelevancy.

What better metaphor is there for a frail and flaccid organ of state, hopelessly outdated and weak, an appendage that only manages to appear even arguably among the living while under direct sunlight by virtue of a costly and thick mass of cosmetics, than, in the midst of this historic upheaval, the Secretary of State falling and fracturing an elbow, forcing her absenteeism at an Angelina Jolie attended White House event marking World Refugee Day? Much to the relief of everyone scheduled to attend, the event was unceremoniously canceled. One wonders if a 3am phone call from Tehran was forwarded to George Washington University Hospital.

True, expectations may be overly high, but unbloodied green shirts on the well-fed and unbruised bodies of Western 20somethings are, as it happens, much more pleasing to the senses than badly silk-screened and poorly groomed images of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The green shootsshirts will still be good for St. Patrick's day next year and, after all, someone has to stimulate the textile business in these troubled times.