That's A Obscenely Large Number, However You Look At It.

655,000 Iraqis, 2,700+ U.S Troops, including 44 in just this month so far. Respected scientists, using accepted methods, have estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Most of them by violent means. Conservatives have jumped all over the report and tried to discredit it. Bush just doesn't find it "credible". OK, let's assume, arguendo, the number is way high. Say it's really out of whack and it's off by 100%. You can't trust those guys at Johns Hopkins to get any thing right anyway. Even if they exaggerated the number by a factor of 2, that's still 325,000 more or less. Does that make the war any less obscene? I don't think so.

And from which focus group did the word "caliphate" come? Bush used this term four times in his Rose Garden mumble fest yesterday. Maybe it came up on his desk calendar of middle eastern words that sound like something bad if you squint and gesture when you say them.

Protect us from idiots and liars.