Posted by Jay Livingston
It wasn’t just a slip. It wasn’t a temporary lapse to be corrected later. Romney has been saying it for months.*
Syria is Iran’s route to the sea.
Anyone who looks at a map will know that Romney has some ’splainin’ to do.
We haven’t gone to war with Syria or Iran, at least not yet, but we did invade Iraq. Maybe Bierce’s observation applied seventy years ago, when newsreels had dash-lines rolling across a map to show the progress of Allied forces. Maybe it applied during Vietnam, when TV news each night showed us the regional map with little explosion symbols marking battles or bombing targets.
Will the network news shows tonight (not Fox, of course, but the serious news sources) show Americans where these countries are?
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*Back in April, Glenn Kessler at the WaPo FactChecker had this summary.
** Last month’s post on ignorance and arrogance is here.
1 comment:
It is extremely bizarre that he keeps saying this. I have to assume that if this was the result of his own ignorance, someone in his camp would have corrected him for his own sake. Perhaps he's just using American ignorance of geography to give a shorthand explanation of a complicated issue? Maybe he means it more as a metaphor? But why invite the Obama campaign to paint him as a foreign policy novice? I'm stumped.
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