Appended to the end of a New York Times account on July 19 of the chaos, bloodletting, and civil war raging in Iraq, with more than 14,000 deaths reported since January (and that only the tip of the iceberg), was this unintentionally hilarious nonsense from your secretary of energy:

The American energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, who met with Iraq’s oil and electricity ministers in Baghdad, had a rosy view of progress here since his last visit in 2003.

“The situation seems far more stable than when I was here two or three years ago,” he said in an interview in the fortified Green Zone. “The security seems better, people are more relaxed. There is an optimism, at least among the people I talked to.”

Of course, Bodman hasn't been conversing with the 14,000 dead Iraqis.