Everyone has their own way of dealing with unpleasant facts about the world. Some of us confront them head-on. Some of us snark about them on the Internet while doing nothing substantive to fix the problem. Some of us drink heavily. (Some of us do two out of three.) But there aren't a lot of adults who admit to the "nah nah nah I don't know what you're talking about" approach. It's fun to know that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of them.

During the Iranian president's controversial Q&A at Columbia University, he was asked point-blank about the treatment of homosexuals in his country. And apparently, it's fine -- because there are no homosexuals in Iran. Cue the laughter of the student body. But he's not joking.

I suppose what he actually means to say is that the openly gay lifestyle is completely non-existent in Iran, which is true. This is because persecution is rampant and public hangings of the openly homosexual are not unheard-of, given that all penetrative sexual acts between men are punishable by death. Given what that says about the state of human rights there, maybe I'll take a cue from Mahmoud, and try avoidance for a little while.

After producing and directing the 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, filmmaker Robert Greenwald and his company Brave New Films partnered with several other organizations, including MoveOn.org and The Sierra Club, to act as an online watchdog group against FOX News and their “fair and balanced” reporting. This video from said watchdog group, FOX Attacks, is a side-by-side comparison of FOX News’ rhetoric leading up to the war in Iraq (much of which was inaccurate and misleading) and the current FOX News drum-beating about the dangers posed by Iran. Is FOX News trying to push America into another war? Boy, I hope so!

Frankly I’m not sure what Robert Greenwald is so worried about. I mean, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going so well, I bet we could just pop over to Iran, knock that place into shape and be home in time for Leno. After all, we do have a massive surplus of fully trained, combat ready troops, just sitting around in their brand-new fully-armored Humvees with nothing to do. Sure, Iran is larger and more heavily populated than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, but after the easy KOs our boys scored in both of those countries I think they’re ready for a challenge. Also, look at a map -- Iran is right in-between Iraq and Afghanistan, so once we get Iran in line, we can just combine all three countries into one giant country called Irafraqanistan. Then all the problems in the Middle East will be solved and we can move on to bigger issues: like when is Robert Greenwald going to direct the film adaptation of the stage adaptation of his 1980 Olivia Newton-John roller disco musical Xanadu?

In this 1994 post-Desert-Storm interview, Dick Cheney is asked if UN troops should have invaded Bagdhad. His confident and emphatic reply? "No." And why is that? Well, he says:

1. If we'd gone in there, we would have been alone, without the support of other forces.

2. Once we'd taken down Saddam's regime, what would we put in its place? It's a volatile region, and if you destabilized the central government, you create the possibility of pieces of Iraq splitting off, either voluntarily or by the force of neighbors such as Syria and Iran.

3. While Desert Storm had a low-by-military-statistics number of casualties (146), as Cheney points out, those numbers were not small to the fallen soldiers or the people who loved them. So the natural next question becomes, "How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgement was, not very many, and I think we got it right."

Um... Was there some kind of pod person incident sometime after '94 I'm unaware of? Where was this guy in March 2003? 'Cause this guy is all chatty and reasonable and cautious and forthcoming with information and whatnot. But here we are with the thousands of dead Americans and the Iraqi citizens getting blown up by car bombs every day, and I look at this interview and I feel like Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer: "Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!"

In this excerpt from an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, McCain is given the chance to rectify the damage done by his most recent political gaff/Beach Boys tribute. But while this follow-up to the hit single "Bomb Bomb Iran" lacks the catchiness of the original classic, both tracks share the same screwed-up attitude towards foreign policy. What next, Senator -- referring to the complaints of your detractors as "pet sounds"?

We joke about American politics being reduced to slogans and theme songs -- but there's a hint of truth in every good joke. And the really great jokes can be more than a little disturbing. Take, for example, John McCain's distillation of future US foreign policy into a Beach Boys riff. On the surface, it seems like he's just kidding around. But then you realize that a Presidential candidate is talking about bombing another country. And laughing while he does it.