A Duke-Stir Wannabe

Things must be really bad in Iraq given that a Republican was willing to go to these lengths to make it look peaceful over there.

From Editor & Publisher:

How far will critics of media coverage of the Iraq war go to prove reporters are wrongly focusing on the negative?

One answer came this week, in a shocking if amusing episode featuring one Howard Kaloogian, a leading Republican running for the seat in Congress recently vacated by indicted Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

He posted on the official Web site for his campaign a picture taken in “downtown Baghdad,” he said, during his visit to the city, which supposedly indicated that the media was wrong about the level of violence in the city. “We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq,” he wrote. “Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism."

But the blogosphere quickly smelled a rat. The photo featured people who didn’t seem dressed quite right for Iraq, and signs and billboards that looked off, too.

* * * In less than a day, it was over. “Jem6X” at the popular DailyKos blog confirmed the street scene was in Istanbul, not Baghdad.

Tipped off by someone who recognized the actual intersection in Istanbul, Jem went through online photo galleries and in a matter of minutes today found a snap taken by a “Faruk” that lined up with the “Baghdad” photo in numerous conclusive ways. Game, set, and match to the blogosphere.

Think about it -- this Republican's point (which, of course, matched the GOP talking point on this issue) was that Iraq is really a super peaceful place and what is really going on is that the evil libral media are distorting the truth and making the situation in Iraq appear a lot worse than it really is. But in order to make his point, Kaloogian had to post a picture of Istanbul and then falsely claim it was downtown Baghdad.

One can only assume that either (1) it was too dangerous for him or his people to take any pictures of downtown Baghdad when he was there, or (2) any pictures this guy took of downtown Baghdad showed that it was a dangerous place and were therefore unusable as tools for GOP propaganda.

UPDATE: Here is Kaloogian's explanation:

[O]n the way back from Baghdad some of the crew stopped in Istanbul as a layover. We turned all the photographs [from the trip] over to the webmaster, and it appears he took one from the stopover and not from Baghdad. If a mistake happened, we'll correct it.

Kaloogian further noted that he "brought back 'hundreds and hundreds' of photographs from the trip," but he declined to identify his webmaster.

Nice try, you lying piece of dreck.