Does it matter if Willard Inc. has no idea what he's talking about re. Iran (or anything else)?

Think of this as a sort of geographically themed board game involving global strategy. Let's say you're Iran and you want "a route to the sea." Where would you go? (And no fair having Google Maps chart you a route, although as it turns out that would actually have been a prudent course for one of Wednesday night's presidential "debaters.") Hmm . . . Why, of course! You'd go by way of . . . um, Syria?

MAP NOTE: Commenter ‪hndymn1014‬ noticed that the map includes the COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES, which he hasn't "seen referenced since the early '90s," and wonders where the map came from. As I pointed out, it came -- where else? -- from the Internet. Actually, if you click to enlarge the graphic, you can more easily read the credit: Bruce Jones Design Inc. 1992. Great catch, H!

by Ken

Or that his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination know if anything less? It's probably unreasonable to expect Willard and the others just to say, "I don't know a friggin' thing about it" when they're asked about, you know, issues. They've been trained to think, probably correctly, that it doesn't matter, and certainly not to admit it.

For one thing, they and their consultants probably proceed from a deep conviction that however little their candidate knows, he's preaching to an electorate orders of magnitude dumber still. For another thing, they know that we live in an era that worships both ignorance and stupidity. So they just make it up, either on the fly (I think Noot, with his delusions of intellectual competence, has a tendency to wing it in his public yammering) or, more likely, prescripting gibberish that's aimed at pushing voters' emotional hot buttons.

In Willard's defense (sort of), I guess when you're really rich, you don't have to look at no stinkin' maps, or know where some piss-ass foreign countries are, or who's running them or how, not even if you're going to try to win votes by threatening to go to war with some of those countries. After all, you don't have to know where a country is to invade it, do you? There's bound to be somebody on the payroll, down there in the lower-moneyed ranks, who has access to a map.

I'm trying to be humorous about this, but I really don't find it the least bit funny. And I don't mean to single out this geographic, or rather geopolitical, blunder for a "gotcha"-tude. It seems to me utterly representative of what happens every time one of these GOP presidential wannabes opens his (or her) mouth. What comes out is demeaning to the very existence of the human species. What's worse is that there's an electorate willing to put up with all but the most thunderingly egregious cretinousnesses.

Al Kamen flagged this in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

The coast is not clear

There was plenty of truth-stretching in Wednesday’s GOP debate -- along with a few outright whoppers. But one slip-up from Romney, we assume, was a simple matter of geographical confusion.

The former Massachusetts governor, talking about the threat from Iran, mentioned Syria, which he said was Iran’s "only ally" in the Arab world. Well, maybe not. There's Iraq, reduced to pretty much a vassal state of Iran these days. But let's give that a pass.

Then Romney, in highlighting the ties between the two countries, claimed that Syria "is also their route to the sea."

Um . . . that seems unlikely, unless the Iranians are taking a pretty convoluted path. In fact, Iran itself has direct access to waterways, with about 1,520 miles of coastline along the Arabian Sea. It doesn't even share a border with Syria, so this "route to the sea" that Romney spoke of would involve cutting through Iraq before cutting through Syria to get to the sea. The journey from Tehran to Damascus is about 1,000 miles.

Not exactly an easy jaunt.

Syria has a measly 119 miles of coastline fronting the Mediterranean.

Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, says Romney probably was referring to the fact that Syria is Tehran's "most heavily used logistical route for resupply of Hezbollah and Hamas." But, she says that's got nothing to do with water. "That relationship has little if anything to do with access to the Mediterranean," she says.

But hey, if Romney's right, there's no wonder Iranians are having such a hard time developing nuclear weapons -- it seems math might not be their strong suit.

Does it matter if presidential candidates literally have no idea what they're talking about when they spew they spew their blithering lies and propaganda? Well, to pick a random example, a fellow name of George W. Bush couldn't have found Iraq or Afghanistan on a map (heck, you probably couldn't have gotten him to look at a map), and look how that worked out.

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