Nobody who pays the faintest attention thinks that Shiite Iran has or wants anything to do with the Sunni radicals in al Qaeda. For one thing bin Laden’s Iraq branch spends more energy slaughtering Shiites than it does attacking us. Sounds like a great program for Shiite Ayatollah Khamenei to promote, doesn’t it? Yeesh. Thinking that the two have some mutually supportive relationship is like proving your baseball knowledge by arguing that the Dolphins should start David Beckham. It makes a person hard to take seriously.
John McCain says crap like this every day. Joe Lieberman corrects him (twice) and McCain keeps saying it anyway. By any reasonable measure McCain’s crayon-book understanding of the mideast ought to be his candidacy’s most prominent weakness, a shameful sore point that he avoids talking about at all costs; his Chalabi if you will. Yet through some weird oversight that hasn’t happened.
Maybe the media has leaned to expect the GOP to field drooling morons. In fairness it has become about as unusual as spring robin poop on curb-parked cars. Nonetheless one can only look at a case like this, when young men doddering old cranks are being failed by a system that refuses to hold them accountable, and shake one’s head at the soft bigotry of low expectations.