More ships, good.

More ships, good.

“To compare modern American battleships and Navy with bayonets, I just don’t understand that comparison,” the GOP vice presidential nominee said on “This Morning” on CBS. [...] “The president’s—all these defense cuts, if all these defense cuts go through, our Navy will be smaller than it was before World War I. That’s not acceptable. And, yes, the ocean hasn’t shrunk. You still have to have enough ships to have a footprint that you need to keep sea lanes open, to keep our strength abroad where it needs to be.”

There's message discipline and sticking to talking points, and then there's sounding like a total idiot. Paul Ryan went with option B:It would be absolutely hilarious if this wasn't the man who would be a heartbeat away from becoming commander-in-chief of the United States. If anything, Ryan just demonstrated an even more constrained understanding of the modern world than Mitt Romney did last night. It's as if these two memorized a handful of catch phrases from high school world affairs textbooks ( "route to the sea," "sea lanes") and think that tossing them around in their talking points will allow them to bluff their way through.

And the rest of the world, allies and enemies alike, are watching this with a mixture of incredulity and horror. Could America really be stupid enough to foist these two onto the world stage?

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