Thursday, December 28, 2006

That John Kerry photo

America's Fighting Keyboarders are having much fun with this photo, which purports to show Senator John Kerry sitting alone at a dining hall table in a US facility in Baghdad. One strange thing is that the people circulating and bravely captioning this photo are the same people whose detective work on photographs from the Israeli invasion of south Lebanon helped prove that the death toll from that invasion was in fact zero, yet they don't wonder why there's a Union Jack on the wall behind Kerry.

Nor do they compare the photo with others from Kerry's visit, where he clearly did interact with troops. And before anyone starts talking about the facial expressions on the troops in the photos, compare them to these photos of troops meeting their Commander-in-Chief.

UPDATE: 2 days in a row we've been thinking along the same lines as TPM Muckraker. Here's their sustained detective work on the Kerry "photo" in which the Union Jack is apparently only one of several problems. And here's their update on the Cliff May post from yesterday. And in the small world department, the original distributor of the Kerry photograph, and therefore the person who can say conclusively where it came from, is Scott Hennen, who inadvertently got Dick Cheney to admit that the US uses waterboarding.

FINAL UPDATE: Powerline's "Hindrocket" establishes in some detail that the room in question is indeed in the US Embassy in Baghdad and that the photo is probably genuine -- and therefore cannot be a picture of Kerry dining with troops. Remember, diplomats aren't soldiers, at least not yet.

REALLY FINAL UPDATE: The photo isn't bogus, but the interpretation is.

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