With a post title stolen from Mick and Keith, I bring you lies. On Wednesday, I opened an email titled, “Military Deaths.” My friend’s comment was “Interesting!!!,” followed by a forwarded email introduced by slamming “The Jim Lehrer News Hour” as “Just one example of today’s biased press,” and noting the show is “partly funded by all of us who pay taxes.” Are you with me so far?

The introduction goes on to criticize Mr. Lehrer for doing “moments of silence” to honor American soldiers killed in Iraq because he never did so during “Clinton’s military operations.” In a second forwarded email came the “proof” titled “MILITARY DEATHS FOR TWENTY YEARS” that included “military fatalities” from 1980 to 2006. Yeah, it’s actually a 27 year span, but that’s not the lie, that’s just stupidity. The numbers suggested more American soldiers died under Clinton than Bush, by 13,417 to 9,016. Toward the end of the email, there was an invitation to confirm the statistics via a linked report. I accepted the invitation, read the report and discovered the numbers as reported are highly distorted. They contain “total fatalities” by any means… illness, accident, etc. “Hostile action” deaths during the Clinton years were actually 148, not the 13,417 bullshit slant put forth by the author. I think we’ve lost a few more than 148 under Dubya and Dick…

Finally, the piece of fiction; undoubtedly read and believed as fact by many red-state drones asked a couple questions that I’ll answer:

  1. “Why does the mainstream Print and TV Media never provide statistics like these?” Well, because they’re lies intended to lessen the horror over American Military deaths perpetuated by the Bush Administration, but you can probably find them on FauxNews.
  2. “Why do the mainstream media hate the war as much as they do?” Maybe because the war was unjustified, has turned much of the world against us, and was sold to the American public with lies just like yours.

We can expect much more of this creative writing coming out of undisclosed right wing locations over the coming months. The smear campaign they’ll wage against either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama will be furious. Oh, and there’s dirt under Senator McCain’s fingernails as well. I do have some hope that the Democats will rise above it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Speaking of lies, have you ever wondered how historical events would have been reported by Fox?