They’re both easily fooled. Last week I posted about how Paul Krugman of the Times and Lawrence O’Donnell over at MSNBC were taken in by a satirical piece published on Politico.com, referencing it as fact. Well, they shouldn’t feel so bad (at least not about that). The Iranians are not doing much better. Seems they mistook an article in the Onion, which makes stuff up in the pursuit of yucks (unlike MSNBC, which makes stuff up in the pursuit of bucks), for fact.

This FARS post from today (datelined Tehran) is a word-for-word copy of this article that went up on The Onion‘s website on Monday, headlined “Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama,” joking that West Virginia voters would rather have a beer with the president of Iran than the leader of their own country. However, the FARS story does contain one slight omission— a phrase describing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed.”

Now anybody who knows anything about rural whites knows that they’re predominately premillennialist, and so are fans of Israel. Granted, that puts them in a tough spot when having to choose between Obama and Eimahjerkwad, but I’m guessing they’d give the edge to the president, because an American Muslim would be preferable to a foreign-born one.

IN OTHER NEWS: Muslims burn down Buddhist temples in Bangladesh because it has been a good two weeks since they’ve burned something down, and you just can’t sit around and wait for YouTube to produce something indecent in that regard.