(Video) Bill Maher contrasts Bush's political literacy with Obama

Monday on Larry King Live, political comedian Bill Maher pointed out that it might be smart for a change to have a president that has lived oversees before -- since foreign policy is our number one challenge.  When we went into Iraq, Bush did not even know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites:

MAHER: He's (Obama) only been in the Senate a couple of years.  But he has a different kind of experience -- for example, he lived oversees.  That might be helpful since we're in so much trouble oversees.  He understands the Muslim world, compared to our present President, who had to ask at the time we were invading a Muslim country -- when he was told that Iraq was made up of Sunnis and Shias -- he said, "Oh, I thought there were Muslims over there."  To me, this is an impeachable offense.  To me, this is an insult to me -- when Bill O'Reilly says, "You really think he's stupid?"  Yeah.  Somebody who invades a Muslim country and doesn't know that there's a potential civil war between the Sunnis and the Shias brewing -- that's stupid, and that's impeachable.

I don't know if it's impeachable -- but you can easily see where Maher is going with this.  The central question is what is experience?  Is experience how many years you have spent in Washington?  If it is about that, then Obama clearly loses out.  Or is experience about your proven ability to think outside the box?  The president is not just the commander-in-chief of the United States, he or she speaks on our behalf to the rest of the world.

In my view, whoever we choose as the Democratic nominee -- whether it be Obama, Richardson, Hillary, or someone else -- needs to have the political literacy to understand the complexities behind the foreign problems that we now find ourselves in.  Saying "Bring 'em on," or "We're gonna smoke 'em out" conveys a knee-jerk, reactionary mindset to the rest of the world.  This is serious business going on here.  We need to restore our credibility on the world stage.  It starts by having a presidential ticket from top to bottom that is best able to help the United States re-establish itself as a credible, honest broker of international peace and stability.