Jeez, you would think he might at least recognize Arabic when he saw it....

The Mandarin is biased when it comes to studying foreign languages. After all, why so you think they call him the "Mandarin?" Anyway, one of the Mandarin's hot buttons is the sad fact that in America knowledge of, or even a rudimentary familiarity with foreign languages (except for America's unofficial second language - Spanish) seems to be dying out.

Here is an example, courtesy of Howard Kaloogian - a man who plans to run for Congress in the Mandarin's home state of California. Howard recently traveled to Baghdad (or did he?) and now he is trying to convince us that life in Baghdad is just peachy these days. He wants us to condemn the lefty press bias that fills our news with (doctored?) pictures of dead children and car bombs and mass execution of Shiite police recruits -- all purpotedly from some fictional civil war that he claims isn't happening. Just look at the happy Baghdadites, peacefully going about their daily lives. He wrote:

We took this photo of dowtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.

The problem is the picture. I don't expect a wingnut like Howard to recognize that the signs are in Turkish, but I would have expected him to notice that there is not a single Arabic letter in the entire scene!

Jeez Louise! The Mandarin is sad to say that we in America get the Congress we deserve. The voters of San Diego deserve better.


UPDATE: Parody is the sincerest form of ridicule - click me.


Photo source: linked page on Josh Marshall's "Talking Points Memo."