How can he sleep at night?

It is beyond my imagination how George W. Bush can sleep at night. His mega debacle in Iraq has caused the death of 3,455 US troops since he began his war. The number of Iraqi deaths has to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The lowest numbers for Iraqis killed by Bush's war come from Iraq Body Count, which counts a death only if it has been listed in at least two public reports; they claim between 64,351 and 70,49 deaths. The highest numbers come from last year's Johns Hopkins/Lancet study; they claim over 655,000 deaths. In looking at the low count, one has to ask how many deaths have gone unreported because bodies were vaporized in attacks like Shock And Awe and the pulverizing of Fallujah. One also has to ask how many deaths were not reported by the two million Iraqis who have fled to Syria and Jordan and beyond or by the two million Iraqis displaced within their own country.

Everyone with eyes at least ten percent open has long known about the Bush cabal's WMD lies and their endless attempts to construct a Saddam connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. (Now the evidence is on the table that Bush's own National Intelligence Council told him in January 2003--two months before he attacked Iraq--what would result from attacking that country, namely that Al Qaeda would THEN join Saddam's gunmen and militant Islamists to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq.)

So the status quo is 147,000 US troops stuck in the midst of a vicious sectarian civil war in an Iraq that is really three countries (with one of them, Kurdistan, flying its own flag), a torture-justifying Attorney General holding on to an office tainted to its core, a billion US dollars going up in smoke every four days, and too many Democrats in Congress looking for (or not looking for) a lost spine.

76% of Americans say this war/occupation is going badly. If this means the other 24% (about 54 million adults) believe it is going well, we are in a state far beyond sad. However nothing should be surprising when polls suggest that about fifty percent of Americans do not believe in evolution (see Sunday's Washington Post). On a flat earth, visibility approaches zero.