ongoing carnage

That the homophobic republican party, you know, the one that advocates torture, indefinite detention, murder, rape, corruption, adultery, and pornography would harbor and protect pedophilia, should really come as no surprise. Perverted by it’s superstitions, it is fiercely trying to hold onto power for the sake of power, not to govern, but to shield itself from investigation, leading to convictions, vilification, disgust, and, finally, destruction. The tawdry foley affair has finally revealed republicans for who they truly are when the masks are removed.

That anti-gay defense that their protectors (the *CCMA) are assisting them in, is ludicrous. So let’s just do away with it once and for all. Why, just in the last few years, a couple of women have been arrested for pedophilia with young men right here in jeb’s Florida. Even here in lovely Redneck City, the convicted child molesters abound, mostly men, mostly with young girls. Oh, and did I mention necrophilia? Poor Terri Schiavo, they couldn’t even wait for the corpse to be dead before they began using her.

No question they would be so rabidly anti-abortion. They need all the kids they can get to satisfy their sex, power, and death fantasies. And after the kids grow up, they’ll have them for cannon fodder for their endless wars, and as wage slaves to support their opulent useless lives.

Although I could rant all day long like this (if I could type faster), that’s not really what does have me going this morning. That’s just to put this into some context: The Lancet Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf

Without offering any proof at all, these same republicans have claimed the report to be false. And the CCMA has gone along with it, burying the report behind the tawdry and sensational. Of course they would vehemently deny the reality. Who would admit to a crime so monstrous? The media are as guilty as the bush administration and its allies.

Let’s get real. The math is entirely credible and proven. It’s used in things we see and use everyday: advertising, or marketing, if you prefer. So unless you have some real facts to refute the report, don’t even bother me with denials. I’ll just humiliate you in front of your friends and neighbors.

The president bush says only 50,000 innocent people have died. I guess he figures that’s ok. You know, killing a few’s ok, as long as it ain’t a shitload. Of course, this is the administration that says “We don’t do body counts”, so it’s obvious the bush just pulled a number out of his ass. As is everyone else who is denigrating the Lancet report without offering any proofs in refutation.

We, the United States of America, initiated, and continue, a monstrous obscenity. What else can a sane person call it? What we are doing to Iraq far exceeds anything the terrorists accomplished on Sep 11, and the Iraqis had nothing to do with it. Nothing. Big bummer for them, huh? In his memorial of the 2nd year of the war in Iraq, Eric Blumrich of Bushflash uses the Johnny Cash song, “Hurt”. In that song, Mr Cash asks “What have I become?”

What have we become?

*Consolidated Corporate Media of America


Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq
by The Lancet
October 12, 2006
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=THE20061012&articleId=3461

Why is the American press silent on the report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths?
By Joe Kay and Barry Grey
13 October 2006
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/iraq-o13.shtml

The US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet.

The study is the only systematic estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians and military personnel to have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation to be brought to the attention of the American and international public.


The Pundit Path for Death in Iraq
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Friday 13 October 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101306C.shtml

No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the war's violence since the invasion of their country. The new study from public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates that the number of those deaths is around 601,000, while saying the actual total could be somewhere between 426,369 and 793,663. Such wartime figures can't be precise, but the meaning is clear: The invasion of Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.

While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering and anguish of the war in Iraq, we might want to ask: How could we correlate the horrific realities with the evasive discussions that proliferated in US news media during the lead-up to the invasion?

In mid-November 2002 - four months before the invasion began - a report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. "The avowed US aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the [1991] Gulf War," they warned, "and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim."

At the time, journalists routinely gave short shrift to that report - treating it as alarmist and unworthy of much attention. The report found that "credible estimates of the total possible deaths on all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from 48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths. Additional later deaths from postwar adverse health effects would reach 200,000.... In all scenarios the majority of casualties will be civilians."

During a live TV debate on December 3, 2002, I cited the report's estimates of the bloodshed ahead and then asked: "What kind of message is that from the Bush administration against terrorism and against violence for political ends?"

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to the other guest: "Jonah Goldberg, do you accept that assumption in that report on these huge casualties, including a lot of children, if there were an effort to go forward with so-called regime change in Baghdad?"

Goldberg, a pundit with National Review Online, replied: "Frankly, I don't. I mean, I haven't looked at the exact report, and I think that there are a lot of groups out there that inflate a lot of these numbers precisely because they're against the war no matter what. We certainly heard a lot of that around on the table last time. Before the Gulf War, we were told there were going to be tens of thousands of casualties."

He was playing off a common US media pretense that the bombardment of Iraq in early 1991 had minimal negative effects. Yet a fleeting Associated Press story reported on March 22, 1991, that the six-week war had killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi people - a figure that came from official US military sources.

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon's missiles, bombs and bullets. And there's a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as unfounded speculation - a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine.

In his major speech on March 17, 2003, just before the invasion, President Bush used boilerplate rhetoric: "Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you."

The day after that speech, Christopher Hitchens came out with an essay providing similar niceties. He wrote that "the Defense Department has evolved highly selective and accurate munitions that can sharply reduce the need to take or receive casualties. The predictions of widespread mayhem turned out to be false last time - when the weapons [in the Gulf War] were nothing like so accurate."

In fact, Hitchens asserted, "it can now be proposed as a practical matter that one is able to fight against a regime and not a people or a nation."

As a practical matter, journalism like that ends up putting cosmetics on death.