Juan Cole writes a piece for Salon comparing Sarah Palin to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (yes, really), and gets our coveted Dumb Article of the Week prize: Sarah Palin, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It’s striking what Cole leaves out of his comparisons; since he’s going for the over-the-top smear anyway, I would have expected him to compare Palin’s fundamentalist Pentecostal religion with Ahmadinejad’s fundamentalist Shiite beliefs. But this comparison doesn’t show up in Cole’s piece, of course, because his main concern is whitewashing radical Islam, not exposing it.