The Lancet Farce

This was a really dumb politicized attempt to bash the Bush Administration. A simple information check reveals teh following:

1. The report was based on a survey of some 1800 Iraqi households, with a total of about 12000 people. And, I am supposed to believe a “poll” is giving me correct data? To really show how invalid the data is, there is this (from page 3 of the Appendix)

"Validation of cluster sampling methodologies as an appropriate alternative to simple random sampling is difficult in conflict situations."

The report itself says the sampling is not trustworthy.

2. I could do a breakdown of the numbers, but I think Terrye said it best in this comment post:

According to this report about 770 people have died every day. Every day. Where are they? They do not say. According to this report 14% of the 655,000 people died as a result of suicide bombers, that would be about 91,700 people. When and where were these people killed? They don't have a clue.
A bad month in Iraq is about 2600 casualties, but according to this so called survey, 22,800 people have died every single month.
A third, or more than 200,000 would have died in air raids. That is more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
According to this report 57% were killed by gunfire, that would be about 373,000 people. Where are the bodies? When and where they buried? (Coach mark adds--not to mention the wounded…which is usually two or three times the number of dead.) Did the BBC and AP, UPI, Reuters, Al-Jazeera all conspire to help hide the truth? Are the US and the Iraqi government together with all the doctors and mayors part of the plot ot hide these hundreds of thousands of dead people?
They took the deaths of a few hundred people and extrapolated them into more than 600,000 and they compared numbers to the pre-invasion Iraq saying there had been virtually no violent deaths in Iraq the 14 months before the invasion. Think about how absurd that is.

3. Official, and even private groups, put the death toll somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000.

How much crazier do we have to get? Are we so hard up for election year garbage that we have to work this hard to make something up? Between the Foley scandal, the War in Iraq, the still not straightened out Katrina mess, and ad nauseum, someone actually worked this hard at making up obvious political hay?

God help us all, because we are destroying ourselves in partisanism.