655,000 dead people.

Congratulations, Mr. President. Heckuva job, running that war you chose to start.

Remember that time you said it was 30,000 or so people? Oh, how you managed to shrug that off. You could almost taste the jellybeans.

Oh, dear. I can't imagine the last time I was off by over 20 times! And I mean on anything, not human live's lost because I just plain like acting like a tough guy with other peoples kids, husbands, daughters, fathers, mothers, sons. Yeah, we're resolute! It'll be shock, then, awe will follow. Yeah! YeeHaa!!!

But 655,000 people. That's a lot.

Like I said, I'm never off by that much. Like when the bill comes to the table at a restaurant, I'm shocked if I'm not within $8! Rarely do I ever think it will be a $20 tab, and it ends up being $400! And that's what I mean, that would be awful to be that far off. And that's just food and beer.

I can't imagine the daily tumble your brain must take as you try to say with a straigt face "30,000" when you know that this world has actually lost over 20 times that figure because you're a sociopath.

And while I'm on this topic, why was the Johns Hopkins/Les Roberts' study disregarded all over the media without any one of those freaking Bushspeak stenographers asking him how he conducted his study? "Who cares what all the universities and Zogby and all the other pollsters say! The President said the independent death count of his war wasn't credible, so therefore it must not be credible. Copy that!"

Why was the President (someone who has everything to gain for presenting his version of the truth) and his Press Secretary essentially taken at their word that the figure was lower, 20 times lower, then the study actually shows?

Anyway, thank God for Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

Watching the talking heads, those that dared even brush by this subject, I saw and heard this-

President Bush: It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited... You know, I stand by the figure [30,000]. A lot of innocent people have lost their life -- 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just -- it's not credible.

- WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more than I saw this response...

Les Roberts: You know, I don't want to sort of stoop to that level and start saying general slurs, but I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.

...

And another thought is that -- quite unrelated -- if someone said in the 9/11 attacks, “I think only 200 or 300 people really died,” we would be really, really upset. And I think in the long view, the danger of discarding this study, if it’s correct, is that, at a moment when we as a society should be showing contrition, our leaders have essentially expressed indifference to an extraordinary level of suffering. And that’s just the wrong message in terms of either our long-term security or peace in the Middle East.

God, I wish that statement was plastered all over the tube and the papers, but sadly it was not. But Bush's "indifference to an extraordinary level of suffering" was shown all over the place.

Thanks liberal media!

And thank you Mr. President for breeding terrorists, killing American soldiers, and murdering over half a million innocent people. My only hope is that before each of them died they could hear, over the triumphant sound of "Freedom" marching straight over their deathbeds of course, the faint sound of you and your supporters congratulating yourselves on restoring honor and integrity to the White House.

655,000 people.

Wow.