Gerson's love letter to Karl Rove is nauseating.

Apparently the great and beautiful thing Rove did for the Republican Party is to turn it into a progressively regressive party--"His key historical insight is unavoidable: Republicans win as conservative reformers."

Conservative reformers? What the eff? Isn't that a bit like 'jumbo shrimp' or "Rove has shown a consistent commitment to inclusion"?

Rove's accomplishments include pandering to the most narrow-minded and regressive elements of society and advancing their agendas for political gain. Rove's accomplishment include divide the country during a time of war. These are Rove's victories.

He's pure politics and manipulation and the fact that a man never elected to office has played such a huge role in shaping politics, policy, war and the country as a whole is absolutely disgusting.

Not just untold. Unknown. Unknown because people don't want to know. Unknown because of the challenges to surveying in a war zone.

From the Iraq Body Count Project:

The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.

Iraqi Civilian Casualty estimates: 69,806-76,258 http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

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From the Johns Hopkins /Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad Survey:

• Estimated 654,965 additional deaths in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2006
• Majority of the additional deaths (91.8 percent) caused by violence
• The study did not examine the circumstances of the death, such as whether the deceased was actively involved in armed combat, terrorism, criminal activity or caught in the middle of the conflict.

http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html

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From ICasualties.org:

This is not a complete list, nor can we verify these totals. This is simply a compilation of deaths reported by news agencies. Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are much higher than the numbers recorded on this site.

Deaths Since April 28, 2005 (Shiite-led government announced):

• Police/Mil: 5,556
• Civilians: 36,212
• Total: 41,768 http://icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

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The Washington Post has some links to some good sources: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/26/AR2007072601298.html

Shazzer4400 makes some good points. I’d like to add that animal behavior is nearly entirely a reflection of how the animal was treated. By which I mean a dog doesn’t choose to be vicious—it’s trained and/or abused to be that way.

Also, animals can’t lie. This isn’t a case of he said/he barked. There is but one perspective, one truth. Res ipsa loquitur, or “the thing speaks for itself.” The same cannot be said of man or woman.

But perhaps the most disturbing reason is that we think, sometimes, the woman (or man) was asking for it. Shouldn’t have been there, wearing that, at that hour, with those people, doing those things. We question the judgments and intentions of human beings because human beings are capable of such higher thought.

All this being said, I still find it disgusting that such outrage has been generated over this athlete’s admittedly horrible animal cruelty than over other athlete’s acts of domestic abuse, rape and murder.

"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response." --Dick Cheney, November 2001

Also see Ron Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine."

There's nothing wrong with a one percent doctrine in theory. It's just very situation specific. Example: Suppose there is a one percent chance that this afternoon space junk will fall from the sky while you're walking down the sidewalk and kill you. You'd probably just decide to stay inside this afternoon. The costs of staying at home are virtually none. The potential costs of going outside would be catastrophic.

But war, unlike the space junk scenario, has definite costs in lives and treasure. It's all about cost analysis. Too bad Cheny was too ideologically blinded to notice.

How long will we assess before we actually do something to limit our involvement in Iraq? If only we'd done these sort of assessments before we went into Iraq. Or, rather, listened to the people who had done such assessments.

This is bullsh-t. It's stalling. The news is what we've always known--our military is powerful and can fulfill its military tasks. But it can't create policy, and it can't undo centuries of sectarian divisions.

The real question is: in all of these studies and assessments, what have we learned about Iraq that we didn't know five years ago? Hell, that we didn't know fifteen years ago?

This isn't learning. It's a distraction.

We'll admit it's a fine distinction

No, it isn't even a fine distinction. You're too generous and buying into the administration's line that if you're against the war, you're against the troops. They aren't even remotely the same thing.

Our troops can perform their military tasks. But they can't create policy, they can't reform Iraqi politics, and they can't undo centuries of sectarian divisions.

The troops are the construction workers, and they're performing their roles. But they didn't supply the building materials, they're not the architects and they can't can't ensure the building's inhabitants will get along.