Ballots Over Baghdad

You have to think the U.S., I mean, the Iraqi Provisional Government, is going to regret planning election day on the bye-week prior to the Super Bowl. (One can assume they picked a Sunday for elections because they thought Iraqis would just vote while at church. I mean, isn't Ann Coulter over there converting them all to Christianity?) If they just pushed things back a week, then America would be too stupified by bad beer, chips and dip and the premieres of colossally expensive and stupid new commercials to be concerned about any violence beyond that taking place in Jacksonville.

For just now we get this comment from Madeleine Haeringer, a producer for MSNBC who was on two media flights from Jordan to Baghdad that had to return to Amman:

All of Iraq right now, even some of the most populated areas, are unsafe and considered too dangerous to vote.

She then goes on to question if we can ever find out what will happen Sunday:

How the media is going to get the real story of the Iraqi elections; it is going to be very difficult to cover. The security within the country is going to be very tight, the polling stations are only being revealed at the last moment, they are shutting down roads around the polling stations, they are taking a lot of security measures such as cutting off cell phones. It’s very difficult to get around Baghdad and Iraq now and it’s going to be even more so during the election. It’s going to be very challenging to get a very accurate overview of how the elections are going.

The good news is that Iraqis have been told not to put slips of paper that say "Press" in their headwear, so they will get through safely to vote. The bad news is that somewhere deep in the basement of the West Wing, Karl Rove and Co. are already creating an Iraqi Daily News that will make whatever happens seem like an election that Ohioans could only dream about having someday.