By Cernig
So today the UK's Daily Telegraph printed a story that claimed prime minister Maliki of Iraq disliked Saint General Petraeus so much that he had asked Dubya to remove him.
The trouble is, as Small Wars Journal has noticed, the story quite possibly isn't true. Certainly MNF-I are calling it a "totally fabricated story" and demanded a retraction.
I am not entirely surprised to find that the story is fiction. After all, how many times have I said that the Torygraph is a tabloid ultra-conservative rag pretending to still be a serious newspaper, with zero integrity or journalistic ethics?
Yet every time the Telegraph prints one of its fabrications about Iran (the Austrian sniper rifles, mega-tunnels under Teheran etc etc) extreme right bloggers are all over it like flies on s**t and suspend any critical senses they have remaining while they salivate at yet another demonization story.
Can you hear me now, Captain Ed? Until now, the Telegraph has been one of your favorite foreign newspapers because they so often print "news" that plays well to the neoconservative base. (Oh, they also got todays story about Musharaff and Bhutto wrong - there was no deal made.)
Maybe next time a lurid tale finds its way into the Telegraph, the American extreme right won't be so quick to link it. But I doubt it.
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