Dogpile on Sully!

William Jacobson, Donald Douglas, and R.S. McCain are all piling on known entomophobe Andrew Sullivan for a really, really silly thing Sullivan wrote today, comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (yes, I had to copy and paste his name in there) to Karl Rove.

So far, it looks like everybody’s focusing on this paragraph:

Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove – the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment of Potemkin symbolism like Sarah Palin.

Silly on a number of levels (Rove “deployed” Palin?).

I, however, choose to focus on this part:

[Rove and Cheney's] demagoguery, abuse of the state, dedication to conflict abroad, co-optation of the armed forces, and manipulation of rural and religious voters all have parallels in Red State Iran.

Is there some other definition for “red state,” or did Silly just compare Republican-voting U.S. states to an actual suppressive police-state theocracy?

Via Memeorandum