A parallel universe exposes John McCain's ignorance.

I haven't posted since my initial deal about how incompetent our Kansas politicians are at creating web sites, but a deal stuck in my head today and I'm going with it. In the past few weeks, John McCain has frequently (and by frequently, I mean every time he's mentioned it) mixed up Shia and Sunni. Quick primer: Sunni is the largest denomination of Islam. The distribution of predominantly Sunni Muslims goes from the western shores of Africa all the way to Indonesia. Majority Shia nations include Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. Al Qaeda is Sunni. Saddam Hussein was Sunni (although his government was secular, which gained him the enmity of groups like al Qaeda).

So John McCain's frequent inability to discern the difference between Sunni al Qaeda and Shia Iran, or Saddam's Iraq, which liked al Qaeda only slightly more than I like Christians who bomb abortion clinics, expresses a supreme and worrying ignorance about a Presidential candidate who claims that his biggest strength is foreign policy.

George W. Bush can be pardoned to some degree for being a moron on foreign policy. Americans knew what they were getting. He was a governor from Texas who'd never been to a foreign country apart from maybe a bender in Mexico. His 2000 campaign, if you remember that far back, was full of promises to stay out of other nation's affairs. Of course, we didn't find out until later that he'd been planning to invade Iraq at least as long as he'd been running for President..

Not that it's any surprise for McCain to be ignorant. After all, he was in that pesky press conference where one of his colleagues claimed Baghdad was "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana." I still have a note I wrote to myself when that story broke. It reads, "Never go to Indiana."

But let's put the ignorance in perspective here. Let's create a hypothetical universe where, for some reason, the majority of Americans are Muslim. And let's say instead of antagonizing the Middle East for the last half century or more, we'd been meddling with Northern Ireland. You've got the IRA, the terrorist wing of Sinn Fein, a Nationalist political party. On the other side, you've got Ulster loyalists, the opposite number. Here in the United States, one of our candidates for President does not have any idea what the difference is between Catholics and Protestants or who's fighting for what side. But he claims that his knowledge of the conflict in Northern Ireland is the strongest point of his campaign.

I shudder to think of what the weakest point of that campaign would be.