Back to the business at hand.
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Another McCain Foreign Policy Gaffe
Deception or ignorance? That seems to be the question every time John McCain makes a foreign policy gaffe. Whether its Sunnis or Shi'a or yesterday on the nature of Iran's government. Joe Klein reports:
When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the "average American" thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss.
On top of that as Klein points out, the president's job is to educate the public on questions of policy. So if the "average American" thinks that Ahmadinejad is the ultimate leader of Iran, it's up to the president to dissuade them of this notion -- not reinforce it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilan-goldenberg/another-foreign-policy-ga_b_102611.html
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"People go in there and meet the moderate foreign minister and the moderates around him, and they fool themselves into thinking the regime will change," said John McCain, R-Ariz., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The religious mullahs will never let them."
So, for McCain, when the moderates held elective office, the religious clerics were the final arbiters of Iranian politics and policy. But now that a more hard-line president has control in Iran, he is characterized as the true leader and the religious clerics are marginalized. The ideology of Iran's presidents may have differed over the years, but this in no way changes the fact that the political structure itself over time doesn't change, and largely hasn't changed, since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even in January of this year, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rather publicly overruled President Ahmadinejad in a way that directly contradicts McCain's recent assertions:
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2008/05/total-ayatollah.html
What's the upside here for McCain, that he's is a flat out liar, that he isn't capable of remembering what he says and believes or that he's willing to adjust the facts in order to pander to what the majority of Americans don't want.
Just how stupid is this guy?
Just how stupid is a party that, unbelievably, survived for eight years by repeating memes - this doesn't say much for a good chunk of the American population, sorry Finn, that includes you, - and now thinks that its survival is predicated on repeating the same old lies.
This is mind-boggling stuff, truly, deeply mind-boggling.
