Huckabee routinely puts his foot in it. That’s because he doesn’t know jack-shit, according to one of his advisers [e.a.]!

A senior aide to Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee admitted Friday that the former Arkansas governor had “no foreign policy credentials” after his comments reacting to the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto raised questions.

During an event Friday in Pella, Iowa, Huckabee said the crisis sparked by Bhutto’s death should lead to a crackdown on illegal immigrants from Pakistan.

Huh?

Huckabee also claimed that (precisely) 660 Pakistanis had entered this country illegally last year. CNN seems to suggest that, on foreign policy at least, Huckabee is toast:

Huckabee’s Friday comments on immigration came after he appeared to make another gaffe Thursday, when he seemed to suggest incorrectly that Pakistan was under martial law.

But Huckabee would only be toast on foreign if most Americans knew more about the world than he does. And that, sadly, is not the case.

As the National Geographic noted in November 2002, a full year after 9/11:

Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy

In a nation called the world’s superpower, only 17 percent of young adults in the United States could find Afghanistan on a map, according to a new worldwide survey released today. …

About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn’t even locate the U.S. on a map. The Pacific Ocean’s location was a mystery to 29 percent; Japan, to 58 percent; France, to 65 percent; and the United Kingdom, to 69 percent.

Apparently without irony, a subsection headline of the article asked:

Are Young U.S. Citizens Americentric?

Ya think?

In May 2006, National Geographic released the sobering results of another survey [e.a.]:

Young Americans Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests

Young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released today. Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel. …

“Young Americans just don’t seem to have much interest in the world outside of the U.S.,” said David Rutherford, a specialist in geography education at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

Ya think?

Ignorance is mankind’s worst enemy.

I don’t know if there are any more ignorant people today than there were in the past. I do know that, with information technology being what it is—and with information being widely available and mostly free in the United States—there is absolutely no excuse for ignorance except the personal failure of human beings to be curious about the world beyond their immediate vicinity.

And I don’t know what can be done about that—how to make people care. It’s a problem.