When the Godfather of tabloid propaganda speaks, people listen. So Rupert Murdoch is contributing his fair and balanced assessment of the human toll wrought by the war in Iraq:

“The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.”

For a billionaire media mogul to characterize the demise of almost 3,000 American soldiers as “minute” exceeds all boundaries of decency. This slice of cold-hearted indifference to the fallen and their families is Murdoch’s way of justifying his support for a tragically unnecessary war that he helped to concoct via the right wing noise machine he commands.

Would it be too much to ask that he express some remorse for those who gave their lives? What about the thousands who are maimed, brain damaged, and crippled by PTSD? And do you think he even gives a second thought to the, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians?

To top it off, this cowardly mogul with a massive American press operation scampers off to Japan to deliver these comments to reporters at a conference in Tokyo. I hope that his press colleagues welcome him home with some questions that call on him to account for his callousness.