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01/22/2006: From the Schadenfreude Department:
At Why Now?, Bryan takes a few star liberal bloggers to task for being too hard on Robert Kagan for not knowing what the capital of Australia is:
I think Duncan and the boys are being unfair.But hey, probably if you took a poll, 49% of Americans would say that Sydney was the capital of Australia, while another 49% would answer "Melbourne" (I leave unanswered the question of how many of the remaining 2% would answer the question correctly). Of course, the reason that many (most?) Americans don't know which city is the capital of Australia is simple: we've never gone to war with Oz yet.
I mean, just because Robert Kagan is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has written on foreign relations for The New Republic, Policy Review, the Washington Post, and the Weekly Standard, who lives in Brussels, Belgium because his wife is the US Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he is paid extremely well for his "expertise", he shouldn't necessarily be expected to know that Canberra, not Sydney is the capital of Australia.
He could have been sick for that episode of Carmen Sandiego and his kids weren't available to find it on the Internet. He should at least get partial credit for spelling Sydney correctly.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
--Ambrose Bierce
Len on 01.22.06 @ 10:12 AM CST
