John McCain makes another unfortunate Iran joke, the Washington Post‘s “The Trail” blog reports:
Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, “Maybe thats a way of killing them.”
He quickly caught himself, saying “I meant that as a joke” as his wife, Cindy, poked him in the back.
In response, liberal blogger Matt Yglesias writes:
John McCain once again “jokes” about his desire to kill Iranians. This time, the joke is a little bit more of a real joke, but the targets of his lust for killing foreigners are clearly ordinary Iranian civilians. If a major Iranian political leader were to repeatedly joke about bombing the United States and killing Americans, you can just imagine the s&6%-storm about how Iran isn’t a normal country with normal interests, that it’s run by irrational fanatics, appeasement won’t work, etc.
As it turns out, we don’t have to imagine Iranian political leaders talking about such things, in fact they do it all the time. The Iranian legislature opens sessions with chants of “Death to America” and President Ahmadinejad declared, “I say accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible.” The only difference is that they aren’t joking. They actually want to kill Americans, as they are doing in Iraq.
