“Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.”

Has there ever been a more perfect moment for this old meme?

On Tuesday, talk show host and worst person Tucker Carlson challenged fellow worst person Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the latter’s dangerous support for further U.S. military action against Iran.

In a now-viral video clip, Carlson asked Cruz the simple question of how many people live in Iran. Cruz could not answer.

“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson asked. “How could you not know that?”

Cruz responded, “I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.”

After a couple more questions, whereupon Cruz began visibly squirming, Carlson delivered his coup de grâce.

“You don’t know anything about Iran!” Carlson said, both men raising their voices. “You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don’t know anything about the country!”

It was a thing to behold, but also evokes another classic meme: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson, the host of arguably the most racist show in cable news history.

He was simply doing what so many establishment reporters have failed to do: He asked whether a top U.S. politician pushing for an unprovoked Manichean forever war knew basically anything about the people he was seeking to subject to American hellfire.

This is not a credit to Carlson. It’s a failure of the mainstream media.

You would think news organizations would have learned their lessons long ago — but that doesn’t mean this is a precise replay of past media failures in matters of imperial war waging.