Cause and defect

Cause and defect
: A dose of CNN logic tonight: The anchor, Carol Lin, notes that after Bush left, someone was shot in Iraq and so she asks whether the visit was a provocation.

Right. If he hadn’t gone there, nobody would have been shot. The war would have been over. The natives and the foreigners would have sat down over turkey and corn and built a great nation. Jeesh.

: It gets worse. Now that same anchor is talking to the bureau chief from Al-Jazeera and she’s saying that because Bush didn’t go out “on the streets” to greet Iraqis it’s “being seen as downright rude.”

And Jon Hendren of the LA Times says Iraqis “just don’t understand” why Bush didn’t come out on the street. Which is his way of saying Iraqis are stupid, I suppose.

Read a few Iraqi blogs and you’ll find real Iraqis — not composites in correspondents’ imaginations — say something quite different.

: Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton, too, visited Iraq. But the Times manages to pooh-pooh both her visit and President’s Bush’s in one graph.

But while Dr. Khuzai found the visits useful, many Iraqis