1000 Points of Death

I am disappointed that the deaths of Americans in Iraq have not made the news until the infamous "1000 mark" was reached. I was in San Francisco in 1995, when this unfortunate item made it into the news: the 1000th person had killed himself by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge. They had stopped releasing an official tally at 970, in hopes that people wouldn't compete for the "honor" of being 1000. Stalin said that to kill one person was murder, but to kill a million is a statistic. We are in danger of viewing the casualties only as numbers.

Worse, the "1000 mark" did not include (1) foreign troops (we are at 1,100 now altogether) or (2) tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and fighters.

Kerry needs to be careful, and so far he is. You don't trot out US corpses for political gain and get away with it (unless you're Republicans and the corpses come from Somalia, in which case the conservative media says 'bless you'). Rather, you have to show that this is the result of bad war planning and shocking indifference of the Bush administration. He hasn't been to a single funeral, and has even banned cameras at Dover Air Force Base where the flag-draped coffins arrive (Clinton, by contrast, watched every dead soldier come home in person).

The right attack is to show the clandestine footage with yet another Bush vacation and say, "Bush, AWOL again."

p.s. I scan the lists every few days for names. You can see the list of casualties at the CNN link site on this page (very hard to find on the CNN site otherwise).