"But don't they appreciate their new freedom?"

Majikthise [with thanks]:

The right wing noise machine is clanking and shuddering. They're outraged about this study, published in the Lancet (.pdf). The study estimated that 665,000 more Iraqis have died after the US invasion than would have been expected based on pre-invasion death rates. (I discuss the study in more detail here)

Here are today's popular bleats:

1. 655,000 is an awfully big number. That would mean that this war killed a whole lot of people. (Jane Galt)

2. If 770 extra people were dying in Iraq every day, why don't we hear about them on the news? (Gateway Pundit)

3. The study was published before the election. (Instapundit) (Political Pitbull)

4. The peer-reviewed paper must be bogus because the editor of the Lancet goes to anti-war rallies. (Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler)

5. The pre-invasion death rates are too low. Surely, Saddam was filling mass graves two months before the invasion. (Chuck Simmins)

6. Those peacenik scientists wish there were more dead Iraqis. ("When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges," Omar Fadil.)

7. I just know the study's wrong, but I can't figure out how. Math people? (Michelle Malkin)

8. Sure the study's methodology is standard for public health resesarch. But don't forget that the public health is a leftwing plot. (Medpundit)

9. These statisticians say that you can take a small sample from a large population and learn a lot about the population. As if. I'll believe those 665,000 Iraqis are dead when they tell me so. (Tim Blair)

Cowards, all of them. They own this war, but they won't face up to the fact that their little adventure helped kill over half a million people.

Say it slowly, carefully, and with deliberation: the White House Iraq Group, and centrally George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, are guilty of war crimes and mass murder.