In a country that doesn’t have a free press, the concept of a satirical news site must be difficult to understand.  At least, that’s the argument one might make to defend Fars, the Iranian news agency that ran a piece from The Onion on its English-language site about how rural white Americans would rather vote for Ahmadinejad than Obama.  Clearly, a more astute observer would have a hard time taking the following statement at face value: “77 percent of rural Caucasian voters … would much rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad, a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed, than spend time with Obama.”  But let’s not put it past the Iranian news agency to report such statements as fact.

CBS News offers some other excuses, noting that “Friday is the holy day in the Muslim world, so it is also possible that Fars’ normal editor had the day off and a more junior member of staff made the apparent error.”  To their credit, it seems that they didn’t take the trouble of translating the story into Farsi before taking it down.  Also, as CBS notes, “they appear not to have picked up a story on The Onion a couple days earlier, showing a green-glowing Ahmadinejad proclaiming to the United Nations that he was, himself, a nuclear weapon.”  Mind you, that one never would’ve made it past the censors.

And speaking of world leaders, it seems Fars has yet to report on the new bass player for Metallica, for that matter.