But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing.

It's funny because the writers at the WaPo obviously intended to showcase the humour of the embassy that isn't there. But it's disturbing in the way (as recounted later in the article) that the meme about this super sized yet invisible Iranian embassy had been picked up and parroted by think tanks, congress critters, in congressional testimony, press reports and more. And apparently no one outside of Nicaragua (at least until now) bothered to check.

I don't mean to be overly critical of Secretary Clinton here. She's usually remarkably well informed, and I have no doubt she felt (after apparently hearing this bit of mis-information repeated over and over) that she was informed here as well. None the less, in this time of international tension between the US and Iran, doesn't it seem as though the press, the think tanks, the congress and officials in our executive branch of government would be, well, more careful?

It appears that certain memes get propagated through our government (or maybe by our government) and take hold as though they were fact when they are actually fiction. Just ask Colin Powell about those weapons of mass destruction, mobile chem labs and unmanned aerial drones we were definitely gonna (but didn't) find in Iraq.

There really is a nation that's building foreign embassies which are unrivaled in scale and cost anywhere in history, One of them just opened in Iraq.  Others are apparently being funded for Pakistan and Afghanistan.  (Read the next sentence with an ominous tone.) And you can only imagine what they're for...