Earlier this week a hard-line Iranian journalist quoted Karroubi as saying he had accepted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran’s current government because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had so ordained it.

Some news outlets (perhaps eager to get the Iran story back into the news cycle after the Haiti disaster) rushed to interpret the secondhand remarks as explosive proof that Karroubi had somehow changed his stance on Iran’s current domestic political crisis.

“Karroubi had not budged at all,” one Tehran analyst told the Times. “Karroubi said that the government is the government of the system. So it does not imply he has recognized it. Unfortunately, BBC Persian and Radio Farda, seeking hot news, sacrificed their critical faculties.”Still, zealous Iranian activists began denouncing him on blogs and social networking websites as a traitor, and parsing remarks attributed to him by his son for other meanings, yada, yada, yada.

But today, the white-turbaned Karroubi delivered remarks that should clear up the ambiguity about where he stands.

“Newspapers have been banned, websites blocked and many of our loved ones are in jail,” he said. “My car was fired on and I’m threatened every day. They also insult me, [opposition leader Mir-Hossein] Mousavi and the great Iranian nation and even distort our words.”

Karroubi talks a lot, often shooting from the hip, as Iranian men of a certain age and temperament tend to do. Astute observers of Iranian domestic politics take a lot of what the colorful Karroubi says with a grain of salt.

There are also behind-the-scenes shenanigans to which we’re not privy. Another analyst in Tehran said any subtle indication that Karroubi was willing to compromise could be a tactical political wink to conservatives like Mohsen Rezai and Ali Larijani, also despise Ahmadinejad.