I'm sure the IRA is predominantly Protestant, too....

Reyes isn't "many Americans". He's the incoming House Intelligence Committee chair, for pete's sake. Many Americans don't need to know the difference between Shiite and Sunni. This guy does.

 

I'm seriously getting the idea that we have several people on this board who are smarter than 95 percent of Congress.

What the hell do these people do all damn day? Because really, for them not to know this shit, they'd pretty much have to make concerted efforts to avoid the information.

When we were attacked, I, like many people here, read a whole lot of stuff about the people who attacked us. When we went to war, I, like many other people here, read a whole lot about the countries we were invading. When the war started to turn ugly, I, like many other people here, read a lot about the groups of insurgents.

I don't consider myself some sort of an expert. And I don't think I've spent a great deal of time learning this stuff (I did hold down another fulltime gig in the process).

So, WTF were these people doing?

 

Fundraising.

They have equivalents of Ph.Ds in fundraising.

 

Note: I was being sarcastic when I said "that's what staff are for." But there are a lot of people, in Washington and in the business world, who really believe that.

 

He's a politician, not an analyst on the Middle East desk at Langley. That's an excuse, not a good explanation. Strictly speaking, at this point everybody serving on the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress should be aware of the key differences between the Sunni and Shi'ite divisions of Islam. As Bob so astutely noted, there are a lot of people in Wonderland on the Potomac and in the business world who believe they have staffers simply to keep track of "minutiae" they consider "too trivial to keep track of themselves."

Many of us have worked for those people.

 

I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that these government staffers don't know shit either.

 

Like the ignorance in the Islamic world that results in killing and maiming each other for differences in their religion that are no wider than the differences between Methodists and Presbyterians?

 

Leadership's a bitch, ain't it?

 

I've found it funny for years how some of the board's elders post with the implication that one political party is somehow better than the other. The democratic party has been so neutered the last few years, they haven't even had the opportunity to bungle. Now that they've gotten back some power, they are able to show what kind of morons and imbeciles they have to run the country.

Bush and his cronies have set a gold standard for complete political ineptness. The dems may not be able to match it, but they've shown real promise. And the new congress hasn't even been sworn in yet.

 

LOL

BTW, can you "imply" with a steel sledgehammer?

 

I find it laughable that anyone wouldn't acknowledge that there are important distinctions between the two parties that should be considered by voters. Are politicians flawed in both parties? Yes. Does that mean one shouldn't have a preference between the two parties? Of course not.

 

Whatever distinctions there are between the two parties are superceeded by their flat-out incompetence and unquenching thirst for fundraising. Just my opinon.

Stories like the one which was the subject of this thread just reinforce it. The incoming chair of the House Intelligence committee doesn't know the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Better yet, he even took a guess, and guessed wrong. What a joke. What an incompetent boob. And he's the head of the Intelligence committee.

Same sh*t, different day.