Fakery and Butchery

Fake this

Good Morning. A few new items today.

• Some of you may have heard about Adnan Hajj, or at least seen his photographs. He's the Reuters photographer who's been caught faking some of his pictures from Lebanon. The right-wing blogosphere has jumped all over the case as proof of a vast Hezbollah conspiracy to massage and manage the news out of Lebanon--as if the war's real butchery was just a sideshow. Pierre counters the Adnan Hajj bandwagon's attempt to deflect attention from the real horrors in Lebanon: The Pictures Are Fake. The Butchery Isn't.
  

• At this writing it looked like Ned Lamont was pulling it off: he was beating Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves and called the race in his favor at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night, because it was time for bed and, well, Candide's Notebooks contributor Ohdave sent in this dispatch arguing why a Lamont win is good for the Democratic Party: Anchors Away...
  

• Wafa Sultan: She's the firy Syrian psychiatrist whose February appearance on al-Jazeera, denouncing Islam's barbarism and violence, has made her the darling of e-mail forwarders and conservatives looking for an Arab-looking stick to bash Islam with. But is she for real? Well, yes, and she's no crackpot, but she's not the crock-pot of pluralism and enlightenment she's been made out to be, either. Pierre's Tuesday Column: The False Seduction of Wafa Sultan...
  

• Pierre quoted by Foxnews.com? Actually, yes, as a result of that column I wrote on back in June on those idiotic NBC shows that go after sexual predators. The original column is here, and the foxnews.com piece here.
  

• Finally, the usual run-down of the latest of Candide's Recommendations...

Welcome to quite a few new subscribers in the last few days. Thanks for reading. pt