Tehran. Tel Aviv, and Toledo

Imagine if the neo-Nazi inbreds who recently staged a "protest" in Toledo, Ohio were in control of a large nation with buckets of money from oil wealth. Imagine if they had cash-strapped neighbors who are willing to sell them assets from their former days of superpower glory - surface-to-air missles, for example. Imagine if the fat, pink race-haters were building a nuclear bomb.

If the neo-Nazis were on the verge of atomic capability I have faith that the streets of Ann Arbor and Madison would be filled with organic coffee shop owners and post-structuralist lit professors demanding that we forego diplomacy in favor of JDAMs and Marines. Blue and red states alike might be in agreement that such mixed-up, angry boys should not be in possession of nuclear toys, and the double-wide in which the white supremacists were processing uranium would quickly be reduced to smoldering rubble.

So how do we handle Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who just annouced the Holocaust is a myth? He could have merely claimed that Europe's guilt in the aftermath of World War Two has caused trouble in the Middle East, notably for the Palestinians. But he had to go that extra mile and prove to everybody that the ruling cabal of Iranian mullahs are indeed exactly as advertised by American neocons - a bunch of dangerous and delusional extremists who consider world opinion irrelevant and may soon have nukes.

So everybody flipped out - inlcuding the Israelis, who noted that the distance between Tel Aviv and Tehran is 2000 kilometers - an observation which comes on the heels of their recent, highly publicized tests of the Arrow missle defense system. And the German Minister went so far as to claim - brace yourself - that Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks "may weigh on our bilateral relations" - a rejoinder which, we hope, sounds a little bit more stern in the original German.

Bona fide jackasses like Ahmadinejad do exist in the world. Are we forced to choose between Donald Rumsfeld and Noam Chomsky when it comes to dealing with them? Because I can tell you which approach the public will ultimately endorse when it comes to practical conflict. Let's hope the question is made moot by the cosmopolitan and trade-friendly middle class Iranians who feel warmly towards the West. These people are hardly extremists, and reports claim they've had it with the mullahs.

The time might be ripe for another Iranian Revolution.