Stupid Mr Kaloogian

Here we go again. We return back to this weeklong conservative whining about the lack of "good news" from Iraq. One future congressman took it to the next level. Howard Kaloogian, a Republican from California, published on his website a photo of Baghdad, showing a calm, peaceful, almost idyllic city, saying "We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be."

But Mr Kaloogian had a problem. The Truth Nazis at DailyKos had already swung into action, and based on investigation, common sense and a healthy mistrust of anything that ever came out of a Republican's mouth, discovered that the idyllic picture Mr Kaloogian had purportedly snapped was not really Baghdad, but Istanbul, Turkey. Ah, that explains the hand-holding woman in the picture, you say? Correct.

Then, Mr Kaloogian, who, by the way, has now been informed by Fox News that they have a news anchor position waiting for him in that organization just in case he decides to leave Congress, replaced the fake Baghdad photo on his website with a (purportedly) real one taken from a hilltop which might as well have been taken from Mars.

But this is what puzzles me. On his website, Mr Kaloogian says, "I just returned from a 10-day trip to Iraq to talk to our soldiers and Marines about their experiences in the war against terrorism." So are we to believe that even after travelling to Iraq with a camera, a crate of Dasanis, an all-consuming mistrust of the American media and a fanatical eagerness to take pictures of a calm and stable Iraq, all he could come up with was the snapshot of an Istanbul neighbourhood? What does this say about his claim of media bias then?

If Howard Kaloogian, an extremely biased pro-war Republican wannabe congressman, wasn't able to capture a single scene of calmness and stability in Iraq during the course of his travels within that country, instead, having to bolster his argument of Iraqi progress by presenting a fake photo as evidence, doesn't it basically tell us that there is no discernible progress in Iraq? That his entire argument is false? That the media isn't being biased and that its reporting accurately depicts the violence occurring over there?

Either that or Mr Kaloogian accidentally flew to Turkey instead of Iraq, took pictures of Istanbul thinking it was Baghdad, and now he cannot admit it because it would make him look like a fool. Take your pick.