The “Scrapbook” section in next week's (September 10 cover date) Weekly Standard magazine excoriates actor Tim Robbins for charging, on last week's (August 24) Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, that, referring to Iraq, “we've killed over 400,000 of their citizens.” The un-bylined article commented: “He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.” Citing the Iraq Body Count Web site, the magazine pointed out that “the antiwar group's 'maximum count'” of “'civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks)'” as well as “'excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion,'” stands at 77,555, “one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins's overactive imagination.”The DrudgeReport on Friday night highlighted the Weekly Standard item headlined, “Hollywood Hates the Troops,” which also noted how movie director Brian DePalma's new film, Redacted, “is based on the story of a brutal rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and the killing of her family at the hands of four American soldiers. Sgt. Paul Cortez, who has admitted his role in the attack, was sentenced earlier this year to 100 years in prison. Most Americans who read about this brutal crime probably understood that most soldiers don't behave this way. DePalma does not. 'The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,' he said last week.”
