Breaking News Iraqi Parliament

Breaking News: Iraqi Parliament Cafeteria Bombed

A suicide bomber wearing a bomb vest managed to get into a cafeteria in the parliament building in the fortress-like Green Zone in downtown Baghdad and to detonate his payload. He killed 8 persons and wounded 20, among them two members of parliament. They included an MP from the secular Sunni National Dialogue Front (11 seats) and another from the Kurdistan Alliance.

John McCain’s silliness about how safe it is to walk around Baghdad should be decisively put to rest by this incident. Security is clearly getting worse in Iraq, not better. Although the Green Zone has frequently taken mortar fire, bombings have been extremely rare (one previous successful one?). It could only have happened if persons who look to the Americans as though they are loyal allies were actually smuggling in components and working for the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement.

Kyra Phillips is saying that a lot of security checking coming into the Green Zone has been turned over to the Iraqis or over to private security firms. “Someone is obviously not doing their job,” she observed.

The oddest thing is that I hardly saw anything about this on American cable television news Thursday morning. (At noon, of course, CNN allows one hour of a feed from the adult news, CNN International, and it did a good job.) They had some small town murder mystery again, or stories about white shock jocks being shocking and racist (as if the owners of the cable television news weren’t the ones purveying white shock jocks with racist views to the world). It is tragic that corporate media get away with using public resources to divert the attention of the people from what is important and to baby sit them with pablum.