Nedra Pickler is at it again

Haven't heard much about ol' Picklepuss lately, have we?

Well, in her coverage of the heckling Laura Bush received in Jerusalem this weekend (so much for those hearts and minds, eh?), she dutifully follows the Administration meme about Newsweek being SOLELY responsible for anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, even after quoting both Muslim and Jewish demonstrators to the contrary:

Some visitors that Mrs. Bush encountered near the Dome of the Rock, a mosque on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, shouted at her in Arabic. As she left the mosque, one heckler yelled, "How dare you come in here! Why your husband kill Muslim?"

Mrs. Bush removed her shoes as she entered the mosque and walked barefoot on the red carpet. She held a black scarf tightly around her head as she gazed up at the gilded dome and the colorful mosaics.

Some of the women studying inside the mosque were clearly annoyed at the intrusion and waved their fingers at the U.S. entourage. Despite the chaos at both sites, Mrs. Bush kept smiling and said little.

As she left, visitors and media grew so aggressive that Israeli police locked arms and encircled her in a wide human chain. U.S. Secret Service agents packed tightly around her. The police yelled at those who got too close to stay back and pushed them away if they did not listen.

Pollard's supporters also held up signs outside the resident of Israel's president, where Mrs. Bush had tea with his wife, Gila Katsav, and other Israeli women.

No protesters were evident when Mrs. Bush had lunch with leading Palestinian women at a hotel in Jericho, a town that Israel recently turned over to Palestinian control, or when she visited the palace ruins and appealed for peace.

"It will take a lot of baby steps, and I'm sure it will be a few steps backward on the way," she said.

"But I want to encourage the people that I met with earlier and the women that I just met with that the United States will do what they can in this process. It also requires the work of the people here, of the Palestinians and the Israelis to come to the table, obviously. And we'll see."

Behind the recent rise in anti-American sentiment is a now-retracted report in Newsweek that Pentagon investigators had found evidence that interrogators at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, placed copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, in washrooms to unsettle suspects and flushed a Quran down a toilet.

Someone ought to remind Picklepuss that Bush is now sitting with 43% approval ratings and she doesn't need to fellate him in print all the time anymore.