PATHETIC

The Republican-leaning PR firm Russo Marsh + Rogers is now actually boasting about being mocked by Jon Stewart for mounting a slick PR campaign on behalf of Iraqi Kurdistan -- and it appears that RMR has proudly posted Stewart's mockery of its efforts on YouTube.

(Now, perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions. The username of the person who posted the video isn't Russo Marsh + Rogers, but, rather, TheOtherIraq -- which is also the name of the PR campaign. TheOtherIraq -- the YouTube user, not the PR campaign -- gives his/her/its age as 24. Oh, those twentysomethings and their wacky viral videos!)

As SourceWatch notes, Russo Marsh + Rogers is the company behind Move America Forward, which has sponsored a campaign to keep Fahrenheit 9/11 out of movie theaters, a campaign to censure Jimmy Carter, a right-wing talk-radio "truth tour" of Iraq, and other projects.

(You may also recall that MAF founder Howard Kaloogian, in his recent unsuccessful campaign for Congress, included a Web site posting of a photo that was described as a peaceful street in Baghdad and was actually a photo taken in a suburb of Istanbul.)

By the way, I don't think this is going to help the Kurd PR campaign much:

The Turkish military has opened fire on a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) camp in northern Iraq, according to reports by the Peyamner News Agency (PNA)....

Local villages quoted by PNA described the artillery fire coming from the Turkish side of the border as “heavy.”

Turkey threatened to carry out cross-border operations against PKK terrorists hiding in northern Iraq if the US forces in Iraq and the central Iraqi government fail to remove the PKK from Iraq....

Speaking on Monday evening, Turkish government spokesman and justice minister Cemil Cicek announced that the steps being taken by the US and Iraqi authorities to deal with the PKK presence in north Iraq have not met Turkey's expectations.

And was anyone else surprised to learn from this New York Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago that the Iraqi flag is banned in the Kurdish region of Iraq? Another victory for nation-building Bush style.....