Our Man in Ankara

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, when discussing the advantage of a stronger Presidency for Turkey invoked the alleged efficiencies of the government of Adolph Hitler, and now he is trying to walk it back:

The Turkish presidency said on Friday comments by President Tayyip Erdogan about the system of governance in Hitler's Germany had been misinterpreted and that he had not suggested it was an example of an effective presidential system.

Asked on his return from a visit to Saudi Arabia late on Thursday whether an executive presidency was possible in Turkey while maintaining the unitary structure of the state, Erdogan said: "There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler's Germany.

"There are later examples in various other countries," he told reporters, according to a recording broadcast by the Dogan news agency.

I'm not particularly surprised.

There seems to be an awful lot of admiration of Hitler baked into Islamist politics in the Middle East, and Erdoğan is very much an Islamist.

Unfortunately, our state security apparatus cannot look at anything beyond the fact that he's good to foreign capital, so we set ourselves up for another foreign policy clusterf%$#.