Alex Massie noticed this statement by Roger Ailes:

I see myself between the Hudson River and the Sierra Madres. I do not see myself at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or Le Cirque here in New York. Those are people who aspire to different things. They’re the chattering class. They’re the people who think Ahmadinejad wants to have a chat with us and that we haven’t been reaching out to him enough. No, actually, Ahmadinejad wants to cut our heads off and blow us up with nuclear weapons. He’s made that clear. There is something about those people that makes them think, “Oh, he’s just kidding.” No, he’s not kidding. He wants to kill us.

I tend to be a realist about things.

I agree entirely with Massie that this is “a frothing silliness that is almost hysterically unrealistic,” and he is also correct that all that is accomplished by inflating and exaggerating an Iranian threat like this is to make Ahmadinejad and his allies seem much more powerful than they are. What I would like to add is that Iran hawks such as Ailes are apparently entirely oblivious to how much they resemble the picture of Ahmadinejad that they have painted. After all, Ailes and those like him quite openly support launching unprovoked attacks on Iran, they make no secret of their contempt and loathing for Iran’s leaders, and they routinely urge an economic war aimed at destabilizing Iran’s government. If anything, Iran hawks in the U.S. have been far more explicit in expressing their willingness to inflict catastrophic destruction on Iran than Iranian hard-liners have been.

That doesn’t mean Iranian hard-liners aren’t aggressive and very accustomed to using force to get what they want, but it is a reminder that the vast majority of threats of war and national “obliteration” in the last decade has come from our side. Political candidates, elected representatives and commentators in the media have made these threats. Back in 2002, the President himself targeted the Iranian government for elimination. Ahmadinejad might very well want to kill us, but he does not have the luxury to say so openly, nor does he have the means to do it. Not that it will matter to Ailes, but in his public statements with respect to nuclear weapons Ahmadinejad regularly claims that he does not want Iran to pursue nuclear weapons. Few believe him, and I certainly don’t, but Ailes can’t even get this most basic fact right. It would be one thing if “the chattering class” dismissed something that Ahmadinejad actually said, but what Ailes really means is that “the chattering class” doesn’t endorse Ailes’ own paranoid fantasy about the Iranian threat.