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In November 2003, eight months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Americans settling in for their own Thanksgiving celebrations were surprised by the news that President George W. Bush had made unannounced trip to Baghdad, secretly flying there from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to spend his Thanksgiving holiday visiting U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. Example: [Collected via e-mail, December 2013] Millions of Americans viewed images of President Bush like the one displayed above, showing him garbed in an Army workout jacket and carrying a platter bearing a nicely-cooked turkey surrounded by a bounty of trimmings as he chatted and joked with service members while they gathered about the chow line. What many Americans now recall about those images ten years later, however, is that what President Bush was carrying wasn't a real turkey — that it was a plastic imitation he crassly posed with to create a much-needed goodwill photo opportunity amidst the controversy of his decision to go to war in Iraq. Those recollections are wrong, though: The turkey on that platter was indeed an actual cooked bird, not one made of plastic or any other artificial material. The misremembering of President Bush's posing with a plastic turkey grew out of news reporting at the time of the event which noted that the although the bird on the platter was real, it was meant as a decorative piece only and was not actually served to or eaten by troops. At the time, there was some dispute over whether a White House report that a British Airways pilot had spotted Air Force One as it secretly made its way to Baghdad was genuine, or whether the tale was invented to associate President Bush's surprise trip with some publicity-generating suspense and danger. Washington Post reporter Mike Allen, who covered President Bush's surprise trip to Iraq, subsequently penned an article in which he invoked the show turkey doubts about the British Airways pilot tale and lingering controversy over the President's justification for going to war in Iraq to suggest that the White House had new credibility questions: Although Mike Allen did not state that the turkey carried by President Bush that day was plastic (or anything other than the real thing), his critical reporting on the President nonetheless created the impression that there was something fake about the event, an impression which was soon reflected in claims that the turkey itself had been a fake — a plastic, good-looking but inedible imitation of Thanksgiving's central image of bountiful, life-sustaining food. That impression has since been expressed in inaccurate assertions and false memories that President Bush was revealed to have been carrying a plastic turkey around a mess hall full of hungry soldiers on Thanksgiving. Even allowing that the turkey held by President Bush in press photographs was a decorative one and not one meant to be eaten by troops, criticizing the event (or at least that aspect of the event) as somehow being fake might still be considered overblown. As Allen also noted in his article, officials maintained the prop turkey was a regular Thanksgiving feature that had not been created for the President to show off during his visit: Brent Baker of the conservative Media Research Center also wrote at the time that:
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