Really, do we want a president who knows the difference between countries that do or do not exist?

**UPDATE**

Caught by Nooncat, bank clerk breaks out of cone of silence on secret bank accounts in Lichtenstein and fingers wealthy tax dodgers, triggers investigation to include the bank McCain's chief financial policy advisor lobbys for.

Poor Grandpa McCain. People are now getting on his case simply because he is in the habit of not only making stupendous and disturbing blunders when he speaks, but makes the same mistakes repeatedly, even after they're pointed out.

Of course, the guy who professes to be a foreign policy "expert" clearly didn't know the difference between the two factions warring in Iraq. (Sure, lots of people don't know the differences between Sunni and Shia, but are these people running for president as a seasoned expert on the situation?)

He got them all mixed up several times to boot. Not really conducive to confidence.

He's bollixed up several other things that even casual observers or marginally well-informed people realize are dead wrong.

His latest? Continually referring to a country which hasn't existed for about 10 years, Czechoslovakia. (Those paying attention may recall that it peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia 15 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union, which McCain has also referred to as if it still existed.)

Some cynics might take all this as evidence that McCain either A. Doesn't really know what the hell is going on, but just tries to pretend he does. Or B. McCain's brain is turning into Swiss cheese, or as one surrogate put it, he's having some "senior moments".

Now I'm sure that McCain is just as well-versed in foreign policy as the myth his campaign tries to enforce. It's just that he's not so hot on things that have happened in say, the last 35 years.

McCain, when asked, revealed that he still doesn't know how to get on "the internets". He has staffers do it for him.

Word is that they'll soon introduce him to CB radios and then work from there.

I have every confidence he'll get it eventually. Maybe by the time he's 97. Which isn't that far off, my friends.

Even his top surrogates are acting a bit odd.

Carly Fiorina, the perfectly coiffed disgraced and fired former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was on "Meet the Press" last week.

She was asked about McCain's long-time pal, Phil "Deputy Dawg" Gramm, former Texas senator turned lobbyist for gigantic Swiss financial concern UBS Warburg, a company who collaborated with the Nazis and which the FBI is investigating for costing the U.S. billions in taxes by providing tax evasion schemes to wealthy Americans.

Gramm by all accounts was the prime shaker responsible for pushing massive deregulation in the financial sector which allowed the mortgage crisis to occur. As you know by now, Deputy Dawg, sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars himself, lectured us peons, telling us all that the dire financial threats we face is, in fact, all in our heads, and we should just shut up about it.

Since McCain has admitted that he really doesn't "get" economics and would rely on advisers, and that Gramm is his sole economic advisor, this reveals the "let them eat cake" philosophy we'd get in a McCain administration. This doesn't play too well in Peoria. (or anywhere else.)

So Fiorina, in her carefully crafted low tones (what is it with these creepy people who talk so softly? Cheney, McCain, Fiorina? When they start that soft, fake reassuring tone, you know they're lying.) attempted to dismiss this story by condescendingly reminding moderator Tom Brokaw that "the people" really don't care or even listen to surrogates of the candidates, they're more concerned with what the candidates themselves have to say.

Brokaw, to his credit, immediately reminded Ms. Fiorina that she herself was a campaign surrogate, and that he hoped people would listen to what she had to say.

And this is the woman that they trot out as their best surrogate?

Ever get the creeping suspicion that the goal of the McCain campaign really ought to be just to keep it from being too large a blow-out in November?