There are a few things we can't wrap our heads around with this whole story about Blackwater shooting one of the New York Times' dogs in Baghdad. One of them is, why does the Times bureau have dogs? It wasn't someone's personal pet, according to the stories. It was a pet shared by the residents of the Times compound. Even a Huffington Post blogger who was bitten by one of them doesn't explain why they are there. Another question is this: On a day when Britney Spears's 16-year-old sister gets knocked up, who at the Post thought it would be a good idea to split the cover between the pregnancy story and a drawing of a doghouse with "Pooch Sulzberger" written on it? The Spears family is like the mother lode (ha, they're all mothers now) for the Post. Over the years, the paper's probably devoted more ink to hating them than to hating Al Gore. But somehow a cheap joke comparing Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to a dead dog elbowed Jamie Lynn halfway off the cover. And finally, how come everybody who has written about it gets to use a "this time the deadly shooting in Baghdad was of a dog" joke? How is that, in any way, appropriate? Ha-ha! Murders are so common here, it's funny when something dies that isn't an American! That's a real home run.

New York Times in Iraq: Blackwater Shot Our Dog [Reuters]