One of the characteristics of the current Republican era is that when Gops are caught lying, they automatically claim incompetence. The truly astounding aspect of this is that it works every time.
Case in point is the flap over the photo of a purportedly showing a “calm and peaceful” corner of Baghdad posted to the website of California GOP operative Howard Kaloogian who is running for the House seat vacated by Duke Cunningham, a Republican who is serving time for taking bribes worth millions of dollars. (Go here for our coverage of the story yesterday.)
The photo was, in fact, taken in the suburbs of Istanbul, which, for everyone educated after the 1970s, is in a country north of Iraq called Turkey.
Now Kaloogian is denying he intentionally tried to defraud the public by posting the photo and is blaming the flap on the incompetence of his staff:
“They used a picture that was wrong. There’s nothing sinister about it,” [Kaloogian] said.
And, oh yeah, it’s the librhul media’s fault:
In an e-mail to supporters, [Kaloogian] blasted bloggers and journalists for using the photograph to attack his campaign for the 50th Congressional District.
“The liberal journalists who dominate the ranks of the media want American troops to pull out of Iraq before the mission there is completed,” he wrote.
That’s a bit nicer than his earlier statement that journalists “are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.”
Kaloogian will probably get away with this dodge. It has worked for President Bush time and time again over the past five years, but especially when he was excusing his two biggest failures:
- The president has denied lying when he said Iraq had WMD, instead he says he incompetently took the country to war based on bad intelligence
- During Katrina, he denies lying when he said that “no one” could have anticipated the levee breaches, despite videotape evidence showing him being warned about just such an possibility, instead he was just incompetently out of touch while on vacation
So good luck, Mr. Kaloogian. I’d say that with tap dancing like this, you’ll go far as a Republican congressman.
