Politician off to an energetic start

Through Fark.com I found this DailyKos story, which shows a California political candidate lying even before he gets into office.

The politico in question, one Howard Kaloogian, hopes to replace the marvelously corrupt Duke Cunningham. Kaloogian's aim is far less effective than Cunningham, who shot down three MiGs in one day over Vietnam before adopting the morals of the Nixon administration.

Editor & Publisher has more details:

He posted on the official Web site for his campaign a picture taken in “downtown Baghdad,” he said, during his visit to the city, which supposedly indicated that the media was wrong about the level of violence in the city. “We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq,” he wrote. “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."

But the blogosphere quickly smelled a rat. The photo featured people who didn’t seem dressed quite right for Iraq, and signs and billboards that looked off, too. In the now-familiar pattern, the ace detective work leaped from obscure blogs to the well-known (Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, Attytood, more), and back again, as eagle-eyed experts proposed alternative locales, with Turkey a likely suspect.

A reader on DailyKos proved it was in Turkey.

Kudos to the readers who caught this one. It's not a perfect job -- the DailyKos page still has the politico's name spelled incorrectly -- but together they caught a lying politician with his pants down.