Years ago at the dawn of the blogging era there was a site run by a right-wing evangelical named Joe Carter. The man ran a fun site, in part because he was more than willing to let people like me post harsh criticism in comments about Iraq or creationism. One thing that always stuck in mind from those days, written by Joe during the Iraq debate, was something along the lines of “Democracies do not attack each other.” While most of us understood the hopeful sentiment, it was plainly nonsense and as I recall he was quickly taken to task. Fast forward to 2013, just in case there was any doubt how the right feels about democracy, when that democracy isn’t a compliant pro-western one, it was laid to rest this weekend by these three whackaloons:

Raw Story — Tea party-backed Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA) on Saturday held a press conference in Egypt to thank the country’s military for overthrowing the elected government, and at one point even seemed to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood had been behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.“Together, we’ve gone through suffering. Together, the United States and Egypt, have dealt with the same enemy,” Bachmann explained. “It’s a common enemy, and it’s an enemy called terrorism.”

“We want to make sure that you have the Apache helicopters, the F-16s, the equipment that you have so bravely used to capture terrorists and to take care of this menace that’s on your border,” she continued. “Many of you have asked, do we understand who the enemy is? We can speak for ourselves. We do.”

They’re so happy a democratic government was overthrown they’re going on air to thank the military coup leaders who did it. Now, this is surely a legit topic in any dialogue on national interests. But it serves here to underscore a broader point, it’s not the democracy in democratic government that makes a country friend or foe, it’s the government in any country that does that, and that’s not limited to democratic forms of government by any stretch of the imagination. The three whackaloons apparently have enough neurons firing to be aware of that, once the looming threat of inadvertently concurring with Obama is removed from the equation anyway.

But back in 2003, Joe Carter and his pro-Iraq War buddies seemed content pretending not only to be ignorant of it, they had somehow convinced themselves of the opposite.

Oh, in an interesting post-script, Carter was eventually rewarded for being wrong on just about everything by being promoted to help various preacher-politicians like Mike Huckabee spread misinformation willy-nilly. In the 21st century, nothing succeeds quite like failure, as long as the wrong answer you come up with is the answer someone with money and power wants to hear.