Dear George,
You are where you are and are who you are because of the ability of your Neocons to construct fictive narratives out of pure bullshit. In their skillful hands, a noxious stench becomes perfume.
Exhibits A and B are the puff pieces that appeared this week in Newsweek and The New York Times showing a media city called Baghdad returned to a utopian normality. We saw photographs of smiling Baghdadis getting married, smiling Baghdadis dining out, and smiling Baghdadis shopping. It was a miracle. There was not a dead body, bombed out building or burnt out vehicle in sight.
Granted, the articles in both publications cautioned that this was a thin veneer of normality. But in an age of semi-literacy, only pictures speak, so the operative narrative the public will pick up is that the surge worked and Baghdad is once again a thriving metropolis.
Of course, a few photographs were missing, like a shot of one of the five million Iraqi refugees, or one of the five to ten tortured corpses still found every day. But, why upset a fairy tale with reality.
Some claim that the calm is because the death squads have completed there work of ethnic cleansing and Baghdad is now two cities—Sunni and Shiite.
Your puff pieces were possible because all the honest Iraqi journalists have either left Baghdad or are dead. This illustrates the multiple advantages of eliminating an honest media through exile, death or consolidation.
Yes, George, Baghdad is indeed a success story, the success of your suck-ass media. Now all that remains is to start mopping up the oil.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
7:10:49 AM 
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