And responding with whatever the accurate number is, prefaced by the indignant word "only," isn't a valid response to me pointing out a lie.

Right now the media is defending several stories based on sources that they will not produce, or if named, apparently don't exist. Some of these stories have actually inflamed the secular warfare in Iraq, and are not just "harmless mistakes." We are approaching the realm of active sabotage.

I spend a lot of time here debunking crap. The same crap, over and over again. I would bet that if you found one set of documentation I posted to prove my point, you could go back and find that I've done it half a dozen times, with the same proof. It never seems to sink in.

Did you ever wonder why respectable people with reputations on the line would come up with those numbers?

The answer is politics. Both reports on those wildly expanded numbers were due to be released later than they were, but came out early, timed precisely for the elections in 2004 and 2006.

In the year 2004, when this group was touting 100,000 dead, the U.N. conducted the same kind of study, using the same techniques, with more data points, and came up with 24,000, with a maximum of 29,000. The results were part of the "Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004."

The U.N. is not what you would call a reservoir of Bush buttmonkeys, so I called that a valid data point. Add to that the IraqBodyCount numbers, which at the time were in the same range as the U.N. numbers, and where do you think the bulk of evidence lies? Remember, both of these sources are rabidly anti-war.

And I'm sorry, but when did a reputation ever keep someone from lying?