How much incompetence is enough?

The "liberal" media is largely ignoring this recent story about McCain saying Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists. He's wrong, of course, since Iran is largely Shia and Al Qaeda is basically a Sunni movement.

The McCain campaign is trying to pass this off as a "slip of the tongue" sort of thing. Saying "Shia" when you mean "Shiite" now and then is understandable, I suppose. This clearly wasn't just a simple mistake. McCain has said this exact same thing on at least four different occasions. His campaign has even been using this point in its literature.

I just want to point out how, not wrong, but stunningly wrong he is here. Even I knew the moment I heard that, that something wasn't right. That's sort of analogous to getting the Chinese and the Japanese mixed up during WWII, or maybe the Germans and the Russians.

OK, I get that the difference between "Sunni" and "Shiite" is confusing, but the guy is running to be head of the military during a war! It you cant tell Pakistan from the Taliban, it seems to me you lack one of the basic qualifications for the job.

The so-called liberal media is all but ignoring this. There was a smattering of coverage, then the spin began. It seems the party line is that he "misspoke." This wasn't a slip of the tongue. This wasn't him just meaning one word and saying another. As Glenn Greenwald points out, McCain has been making this same error, consistently, for days. The only reasonable explanations to me are that he genuinely doesn't understand that the Iraqi insurgents are not mainly Al Qaeda, or that he is attempting to perpetuate the myth that the Iraq war has something to do with 9/11 by conflating Al Qaeda with native-Iraq hostiles.

Whether it is honest incompetence or genuine malfeasance, it does not bode well for a McCain presidency.

(Update to get my own Shia/Sunni labels correct. Good thing I'm not running for President.)