I’m tempted to say I don’t get this, but in fact I get it perfectly.

So Jimmy Carter “outs” Israel, saying it’s got about 150 nukes. Well, big surprise; Israel has long been thought to have a relatively large stable of warheads, and if you’re Israel, you’ve got to: it’s called deterrent.

But, of course, we’re currently in the midst of our own secular jihad to prevent Iran, which would aspire to be Israel’s most powerful/influential foe in the region, to get nuke one. Because, as conservatives tell us, the moment Iran gets a single nuke, they’ll immediately lob it at a country that has 150.

Right.

So small wonder, then, that the small brains over at Fox News should be braying that Jimmy Carter shouldn’t be telling these tales out of school, shouldn’t be telling these tales at all:

“The extraordinary thing is a lot of people throughout the Mideast have assumed for a very long time that Israel had [nuclear weapons],” concluded Steve Doocy. “But nobody has ever said officially that they had it. So, here you have got this guy who was once upon a time the president of the United States doing just that. … He has just helped Iran.”

The Fox motto: Ignorance is better.

Just how, pray tell, has Carter “helped” Iran? By calling attention to the fact that Israel, you know, has a pretty massive nuclear arsenal?

What - we’re supposed to lie, or pretend it doesn’t exist? We’re supposed to whistle past that graveyard on our way to the conclusion that Iran, getting its grubby mitts on a single warhead, would be the GREATEST THREAT EVAH!!!

Please.

Conservatives need to stop pretending the whole power game in the Mideast is about morality and accountability if they’re going to take this tack. Why not just admit the obvious: This is about control of the region’s resources and about power, and a rising Iran is a threat to our own power, or could be, and that’s why we want to go in with guns blazing.

But beyond all this, this episode should give you an idea of how Fox News, as an entity, thinks. If, according to Fox News, it’s better that neither you nor anyone else knows about Israel’s arsenal, what else have they concluded that you shouldn’t know about, and actively kept from you?