The Current Establishment Rests on the Relentless Lies of Right Wingnuts

They're really, really quite pathological, demented liars:

In her column Tuesday, the New York Sun's Alicia Colon suggested that there really aren't as many U.S. military deaths in Iraq as the liberal media makes it seem. In fact, she said, fewer soldiers have died in Iraq than died in a four-year period under President Clinton. It's not a novel argument, as she readily admitted in an interview with Salon today -- but neither is it as relevant as she made it sound.

"The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133. This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens," Colon wrote. "Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites. What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration: 1,245 in 1993; 1,109 in 1994; 1,055 in 1995; 1,008 in 1996. That's 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who's counting?"

With a tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan, who has already done some of the legwork on this, we'd like to point out the irrelevance of the statistics Colon cites. In fact, when you look at the data provided by the Defense Department, you'll notice that almost none of the deaths during the Clinton administration -- just 76 over an eight-year period -- were from hostile action or terrorism. The rest were the result of accident, homicide, illness or suicide or were of an as-yet-undetermined nature.

These noncombat deaths have not simply stopped happening. There are still noncombat deaths going on in the military, and they are, for the most part, kept as a separate tally from the deaths in Iraq. (To be fair, some of the deaths -- about 16 percent -- that have occurred in Iraq are similarly not the result of hostile action.) The absolute number of deaths that have happened as a result of our invasion of Iraq may not be astoundingly high, but they are still deaths entirely above and beyond those that would happen in the course of normal peacetime military business, and that's not something Colon factors into her argument at all. Military deaths have spiked upward from the final years of the Clinton administration. In 1999, there were 796 total military deaths; in 2000, there were 758; in 2003, there were 1,410; and in 2004, there were 1,887.

More here.

Reality check: The Iraq Fandango (together with the Afghanistan farce) don't seem to be reducing global terrorism.

And don't look to the Justice Department for anything remotely like a reliable assessment.

And here, a humorous look at how modern Big Media ersatz (I know, it's repetitive) journalists spread the manure.

And a little more brilliance from the radical right haters:

"Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn't welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they'd welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright 'hot') most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she's grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her." -- radio host and film critic Michael Medved, on the recent homophobic comments of former NBA star Tim Hardaway.

Link.

And there's more:

This month the Catholic priest who runs the national association of Catholic charities condemned the Bush Administration budget as a moral failure. He said it "weaken(s) family life" and fails to address "the dignity of the human person," and he called on Congress to change it. Also this month, fringe rightwing activist Bill Donohue attacked two fairly low-level bloggers working for the Edwards campaign by claiming their writings were "anti-Catholic."

Which story do you think got more play in the media?

More here.

Now is it a little clearer how the "good Germans" supported and enabled the Nazi regime?