You might say that he's gone too far.
But apparently the White House wouldn't.
They're still pleased as punch with their puppet Nouri al-Maliki.
On Thursday, Nouri continued his attempted power-grab by arresting a member of the Independent Electoral Commission as well as the head of the commission. The arrests of Karim al-Tamimi and Faraj al-Haidari are just the latest in a series of power grabs attempted by Nouri al-Maliki.
The Kurdistan Regional Government is comprised of three provinces in northern Iraq which are semi-autonomous. Massoud Barzani (pictured above) is the President of the KRG. Two weeks ago, he gave a speech in DC in which he noted:
So we have got a situation or we ended up having a situation in Baghdad where one individual is the Prime Minister and at the same time he's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he's the Minister of Defense, he's the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of the Intelligence and lately he has sent a correspondence to the president of the Central Bank in Iraq that that establishment would also come under the Prime Minister.
Where in the world would you find such an example?
Where would you find that indeed.
No one can answer that question, no one in the administration, because they don't want to acknowledge reality and they certainly don't want the American people to realize just what a disaster Iraq has become.
Which is why the broadcast commercial networks repeatedly refused to report, on their very own evening news programs, that Nouri al-Maliki had ordered Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi to be arrested. They ignored it. They refused to report it. As Ava and C.I. pointed out here:
Last week, US President Barack Obama swore out an arrest warrant for Vice President Joe Biden on charges of terrorism. Did you see it on TV?
Actually, it wasn't Barack and Joe, it was Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki swearing out the arrest warrant on Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on charges of terrorism. A political crisis is taking place in Iraq with Iraqiya members al-Hashemi, Saleh al-Mutlaq (Deputy Prime Minister) and Rafie al-Issawi (Minister of Finance). In the 2010 elections, Iraqiya won more votes than did Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law. With US backing, Nouri was able to circumvent the will of the people (expressed at the ballot box), the Constitution and the rule of law to remain prime minister when, by law and will of the people, Ayad Allawi, head of Iraqiya, should have been given first crack at the position of prime minister.
So Nouri is targeting his political rivals and doing so with the commercial, broadcast networks ignoring it. All last week, they ignored it.
At what point does the administration and the TV news get honest with Americans about the fact that a petty tyrant has been installed -- by the US -- as prime minister of Iraq?
A petty tyrant so scary that even Moqtada al-Sadr is again speaking out against him, calling the arrests "dicatorial" and stating that they mean Nouri's attempting to postpone the coming elections or to prevent them altogether.
It's past time that the media stopped 'protecting' people from the truth. Or as Natasha Richardson put it in Nell, "It's time to show her the big bad world and see how she handles it." Instead, it's the media that's playing Nell, chanting, "Chicak, chicka, chickabee. T'ee an me an t'ee an me" and other things of little value to the average news consumer.