Well, despite the well-documented Lancet study that says otherwise, the media drank the kool-aid all the way down when they trumpeted this yesterday:

Violence in Iraq leads most of the papers today, but they mostly choose to focus on slightly different angles. The New York Times leads with a new U.N. report that says 34,452 Iraqi civilians were violently killed last year. That's about 94 deaths a day, half of which occurred in Baghdad. The paper emphasizes the toll is probably higher because the December count doesn't include data from several provinces and some deaths are never reported.

Glad they were able to say that the number is likely low and is thoroughly incomplete. But guess which number the wise punditry class will quote from here on out?

I know I shouldn't get hung up on numbers. Afterall, 100 deaths per day isn't pretty. But by cleansing the full magnitude of what the U.S. has sparked in Iraq is immoral.

Another brief point. I fortified myself with a couple of glasses of wine and sat down to quietly watch the Preznit's interview last night on the Lehrer Newhour. I can totally see how, if you didn't understand the guy's pathology, you could be sucked in. It was his best performance to date sounding emminently reasonable. By emminently reasonable I mean that only about 60% of what he said was bullshit instead of the usual 99%. But that's how far we've fallen. When the Preznit sits there and out-and-out lies 60% of the time, we see that as "emminently reasonable". Interestingly, even David Brooks couldn't get much of a lather up about Bush saying that he "sounded" better, still lacking any kind of real substance while wondering, why should we believe him now?

Finally on the Preznit. I noticed that when asked about "success" in Iraq, Bush said (paraphrasing) that success would look like security in Baghdad. He said something like we will have succeeded when the sectarian violence stops and the terrorists attacks stop. I have one question for Bush:

Wasn't that the case in Iraq under Saddam Hussein?