Fox & Friends celebrated the Tuesday announcement that Bernie Sanders (VT-I) is entering the race for president by inviting a cowboy hat adviser Chuck Rocha on their program to discuss all things “Sandersmania” as it were.

After the usual bromides and pleasantries about fund-raising and whatnot, the normally garrulous and often comedic host Brian Kilmeade bared his teeth and asked his guest of the Bernie Sanders campaign “What is the perfect model to run on Venezuela or Cuba?”

The idea expressed here by the Fox & Friends co-host in his over-simplified question is that since Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist — whose ideas are more similar to Northern European countries like Sweden and Denmark — that he must be fully in support of the failed economic models of Cuba and Venezuela.

Rocha answered the willfully misinforming question in earnest, saying “I think FDR is the best model,” before giving his host a bit of a much-needed history lesson, adding “they called FDR a socialist for creating Social Security. Yes, Brian, I realize we were in a depression but called Lyndon B. Johnson a socialist for creating Medicare.”

One suspects that Kilmeade knows that Sanders isn’t seriously trying to model his campaign after Cuba and Venezuela, and if pressed, one can easily imagine that he would take the “ironic detachment” defense by saying “I was only joking.”

But too many viewers of Fox & Friends probably don’t get the meta-joke at play, and if Kilmeade was being serious, then he’s become the joke.

Watch above via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.