tell me / don't I ever cross your mind / sometimes

9890…..this number scares the hell out of me. And it should you too. The number quoted is the median number found in a survey last week of Americans, asking how many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the invasion.

Even scarier is that 52% of those asked put the civilian dead at less than 10,000, whilst only 11% put the figure at more than 50,000. Of course, the only reliably sampled figure we have to date puts the probable figure, a year ago, at between 350,000 and 900,000 lives lost...a figure which stands as the only credible figure we have despite the voluminous efforts of the hard right to discredit it.

Even Bush, in his response to the Lancet survey touted a figure of 30,000…a figure so ludicrously low that nobody beyond his borders could be expected to give it any credibility. But pronounce it he did, and some traction it obviously did have.

Of course what scares the hell out of me is the ignorance that this survey illustrates too well. It goes far beyond the sort of almost humorous global geographic unawareness that I parodied at the start of this post. On the basis of this survey 89% of those surveyed either have no idea or think that the number of innocents killed is so ludicrously low that it defies reasonable thought. Simply put, they have absolutely no idea of what hell their government and their military have wrought, or are about to, in far lands, in their freedom lovin' name. And they seem not to care enough to find out...after all, as I said elsewhere, they are only against this war because they are having their nuke tipped butts kicked.

No idea at all....and it reminds me of this, yet again….superpower? No it’s a manipulated intellectual kindergarten with a few flashes of brilliance around the edges….. oh and lots of bombs....