Oh. My. God.

Okay. No doubt by now you've heard about the Pentagon paying to plant stories in Iraqi newspapers. NYT columnist John Tierney takes off on a little riff about this, imagining the rejection letters these articles might have gotten if they had been submitted by real freelance writers.

Since Tierney's columns are behind the "select" firewall at the NYT site, I'm quoting it here via a blogger named Tom Worstall. But the thing is, no matter how funny Tierney is trying to be, I'd describe the column as hit-and-miss.

He can't hold a candle to what one of the writers of the Pentagon-sponsored articles, in an apparently true excerpt, tried to get away with.

Teirney says:

You write that these soldiers ''fight for freedom, wherever there is trouble,'' a revelation that would indeed be newsworthy to our readers across Iraq, not to mention the American military advisers. But our readers would remain skeptical unless you could provide more evidence.

"Fight for freedom, wherever there is trouble." That sound familiar to anybody?

That's right, folks. Our goverment paid hundreds of millions of dollars for propaganda on the level of a cartoon/toy commercial from the '80s.

Sleep tight, America.