I don’t know how many of you checked back in to notice LaPopessa’s update to yesterday’s post on McCain’s April Fool’s Day stroll through Baghdad.  Well it seems that every time the Americans publicly announce that something is working in Iraq, insurgents are there the next day to blow it up. 

Horribly prophetic and tragically predictable, it turns out that McCain’s little photo-op cost the lives of 21 more innocent Iraqis: 

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress. 

John McCain: the tragedy that just keeps on giving. 

UPDATE: Juan Cole has a really great piece on “McCain’s Magical Mystery Tour” which is worth a read.  Here is an excerpt: 

Look, I lived in the midst of a civil war in the late 1970s in Beirut. I know exactly what it looks and smells like. The inexperienced often assume that when a guerrilla war or a civil war is going on, life grinds to a standstill. Not so. People go shopping for food. They drive where they need to go as long as they don't hear that there is a firefight in that area. They go to work if they still have work. Life goes on. It is just that, unexpectedly, a mortar shell might land near you. Or the person ahead of you in line outside the bakery might fall dead, victim of a sniper's bullet. The bazaars are bustling some days (all the moreso because it is good to stock up on supplies the days when the violence isn't so bad). So nothing that John McCain saw in Baghdad on Sunday meant a damn thing. Not a goddamn thing.
It makes my blood boil.

Because McCain, you see, knows exactly what I know about guerrilla wars and civil wars. Hell, people used to shop freely in Saigon in the early 1970s! And if he is saying what he is saying, it is because he is attempting to convey an overly optimistic picture with which to deceive the American public.