Mudville Gazette is calling for corrections:

THE PRESIDENT: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.

Today's headlines? "Bush says 30,000 Iraqi civilians dead in war."

Emphasis mine. Also, I wonder if the president misspoke. Is he including all the foreign fighters in that count? If so, they're not even Iraqi citizens, let alone civilians.

This is how urban legends get started, and you can be sure that it will now become part of every lefty playbook. And don't expect a correction.

Well, I wouldn't worry too much. The lefties here in the Bay Area have already been saying that Bush killed 100,000 Iraqi children in the war, so by comparison, this isn't that bad.

You're linking to the story on the election. It was SFGate.com that got the story wrong:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/13/MNG50G76G31.DTL

I see that they've changed the headline from "Iraqi Civilians" to "Iraqis."

I heard that part of the Q&A session - he did *not* mis-speak, the question he was asked was to provide an estimate of the total number of Iraqi casualties - military, insurgent and civilian - by both US and insurgent forces - and he replied that the estimate was about 30k. It was a one question out of many and the NPR correspondent was impressed that he answered it at all, let alone so forth-rightly and directly.

So, the Phillie paper whipped out that 216 point Pearl Harbor font and announced "Bush says 30,000 Iraqis Killed" - apparently nothing else in his speech was of any importance.