Picture Gate: Give Me A Break

The guy's substitute picture is a wide shot of the Green Zone shot from a hotel room. No shit.



You can see the police station in it. The police station that was attacked a year ago.

By the way he acknowledges that these pics were taken last July, when he was there. Last July is "recently."

If you can't find one decent shot of peace in Baghdad (which, again, would prove nothing), you must obviously conclude one thing: you weren't allowed to leave the fortified areas. Which makes sense, since practically NO ONE is allowed to leave. To claim that the media is whitewashing Iraq, to set up this tautology where one picture would prove that, and then to come up with, first, a picture from another country, and second, a wide shot from a hotel, shows an unbelievable amount of either self-delusion or plain old douchebaggery. Josh Marshall has this right:

There are a lot of people dying in Iraq right now. There are a lot of American soldiers doing their best to do their job in Iraq and come back home alive. Kaloogian's cheap tricks suggest he doesn't care much about either. He just cheapens what everyone over there is going through.

By the way, Olbermann, Newsweek and The New York Times have covered this today.