This post is absolutely not by our dearest Michelle; instead, it’s by those rascals at Big Lizards, who crawled out of their holes long enough to bespeak themselves.

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Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was just a guest on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Hugh just asked him if he knows who the Supreme Leader of Iran is; Iran is, of course, our most dangerous enemy in the Middle East.

This is the conversation I heard:

Kucinich: You mean the religious leader?

Hewitt: Yes.

Kucinich: Well I don’t know his name.

Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.

One would imagine, after Andy Hiller of WHDH in Boston stumped Bush in 1999 by demanding whether he knew the name of the then-obscure president of Pakistan (Gen. Pervez Musharaff) and the leaders of three other “hot spots” (Chechnya, Taiwan, and India — none of which I know without having to look them up), that any future presidential candidate would at least learn the names of the leaders of the most important countries in American foreign policy.

Not for Democrats, evidently. I can only conclude that Mr. Kucinich has no fear of being asked that question by the regular elite media.

The answer to Hugh’s question is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei (even I knew that much! I’ve blogged about him many times). Khamenei has actually been several times in the news recently: he is gravely ill and may perhaps already be dead; and there were just elections in Iran, local and for the Assembly of Experts, in which there was a stuggle between Khamenei’s forces and those of President Ahmadinejad’s “guru,” Ayatollah Muhamad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi — who is far more radical than Khamenei and possibly even more than the Ayatollah Khomeni of 1979 himself.

Which makes it doubly mystifying that Kucinich not only didn’t know the answer — he didn’t even seem perturbed that he didn’t know the answer. (To be fair to Kucinich, at least he knew Ahmadinejad’s name.)

Would the word “incurious” apply in this case?

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