Bush absolutely did not visit Iraq or Baghdad last Tuesday

no hanging garden, this [a section of the Green Zone perimeter]

I'm tired of the media's [continuing] misleading descriptions of last week's flight by Bush to Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone. If I thought it was just a question of semantics, I'd leave it alone, but words are important, especially when they are instruments of propaganda and they are going unexamined.

He didn't "visit Iraq".</p>

He didn't "visit Baghdad".

He visited a god-damned super-bunker sheltering people who call him sir. </strong>

Even at that our heroic conqueror's departure for his five-hour stop-off inside a fortified headquarters ("the Ultimate Gated Community") shared by his victorious army of pacification and a more-or-less client local government had to be kept secret from his own staff. Also, what does it say about this stunt that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister and Bush's host, didn't know the President of the United States was coming until virtually the moment he showed up at the door?

[image from Rich Galen's Mullings]