I think they hate us for killing them, and not for our freedom:

(Via Billmon)

Catching Up With Saddam

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

Apocryphal, often attributed to Joseph Stalin
It's hardly a laughing matter, but I had to laugh nonetheless at Shrub's reaction to the latest estimate that the war in Iraq has resulted in at least 655,000 Iraqi deaths -- a total that is not only still rising but accelerating:

"No, I don't consider it a credible report."

Well of course Bible Boy doesn't think it's credible. After all, what do Johns Hopkins University and The Lancet know about faith-based epidemiology? Nothing. They're just a bunch of doctors. Now if the study had been conducted by a committee of evangelical chiropractors from Oral Roberts University, that would be different.

But I thought the number was impressive, particularly when matched against the much more conservative (so to speak) total of 44,000 to 49,000 deaths listed by Iraq Body Count -- a figure based, as the name implies, on actual toe tags, not the baseline projections used by the Johns Hopkins team.