Mere 1% of Americans Can Correctly Identify Nation's Top Global Enemy

Favored pick "Iran" won this season's Gallup poll for "America's Top Enemy" by its highest-ever margin, wow! A full third of Americans picked Iran as their most dreaded bogeyman this year (up from a quarter last year) for, eh, some sort of reason. Perhaps a follow-up "why" question might have been interesting or informative here, pollsters? Nope. Gallup cheated and filled in the essay section on its own without Americans' help, as may be noted from the conspicuous lack of JEE-HAD and TERRORIZM mentions in their concluding analysis to explain Iran's ongoing dominance in this award category: "Iran's continued public announcements of its growing nuclear capabilities, its threats of war with U.S. ally Israel, and the possibility that Iran could disrupt the flow of oil out of the Middle East and further affect domestic oil and gas prices no doubt all contribute to Americans' negative views of the country." Hm. Well to be fair, by this logic that we ought to freak out over the country that's doing the best job of constantly threatening new wars and buying scary new weapons and driving up oil prices, the nation that Americans should really fear most is, ha ha, their own. So what percentage of Americans managed to arrive at this conclusion? (HINT: the headline gives it away.)

 There it is, down there at the bottom, mysteriously tied with, uh, Japan:

(Are you really allowed to name China as your "top enemy" when the cell phone you used to take the pollster's call was built there?)

Anyhow, the important thing to remember here at all times is that it is ALL IRAN'S FAULT, GRRR that all the gas prices are so high these days, via Bloomberg:  

Strangely, the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “People are properly puzzled by the fact that we’re using less gas than we have in years, yet we’re paying more.”

Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” he says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net long position being taken.”

Yeah. [Gallup/  Bloomberg]