Toleration? By Just Whom Exactly?

Dan Froom (White House Briefing) quotes Bush on the Hopkins Lancet war deaths study:

"No, I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- that there's a level of violence that they tolerate."

And adds:

It was that last sentence that really set Will Bunch off.

The Philadelphia Daily News blogger wrote that he was "dumbfounded" by the notion

"that people in Iraq are 'tolerating' a situation where you can be shot dead at a traffic light . . . or just going to the local market, a situation where anywhere from 50,000 (the very lowball estimate) to 600,000 (new high-end estimate) have been killed, not just by violence but by often unspeakable violence -- shot in the head or decapitated, hands bound, with severed penises or other mutilation, often just dumped in the river like so much raw sewage.

"Who is 'tolerating' that? Bush is -- from the comfort of his treadmill in the White House gym -- and Cheney and Rumsfeld, maybe. But do you honestly think that any mother trying to raise a family on the streets of Baghdad tolerates it? And the evidence is overwhelming that they don't tolerate it one bit. Why do you think that a whopping 71 percent of Iraqis want America to leave in the next year?

"What's 'amazing here' is the level of cluelessness -- and deception -- packed into one sentence. Iraqis do want to choose their own leaders, like most people, but the White House is trying to cast what has really happened there -- an unprovoked invasion by the world's most powerful military, followed by a three-year carnival of killing -- as some type of 'popular uprising,' a 'society that so wants to be free.' The overwhelming evidence is that they're merely a society that so wants to be left alone -- by us."

By contrast to Bunch's reaction, the traditional media took no notice of Bush's assertion about tolerating violence. It wasn't in any of the major newspaper stories. The NBC Nightly News actually aired that sound byte, but without comment.

Sigh.

I honestly don't know which is more depressing: the way Bush can just sail on into his own little world where Iraq is concerned, or the way the media just, for the most part, watches him sailing and doesn't mention that, you know, really ... there's no water there.