From Mark Silva at The Swamp:
“‘It’s a number,’’ said the former White House press secretary, Tony Snow, the day in June 2006 when American military casualties reached 2,500.
Today, the number reached 4,000.
And President Bush did not leave it to his press secretary to comment on it – though Dana Perino, White House press secretary, opened this benchmark day in the five-year-old war in Iraq with word that Bush had ‘grieved’ at the report of the 4,000th fatality.
Before the day was done, not only Bush, in Washington, but also Vice President Dick Cheney, in Jerusalem, had commented on the losses of American lives at war.
‘It’s a number,’ Snow had said of the number, 2,500, in June 2006.
‘Every time there’s one of these 500-benchmarks, people want something,’ Snow added at his press briefing that day.
….
Today, the press secretary’s words about grieving were overtaken by the president’s: ‘I have vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I’m president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain, that, in fact, there is a outcome that will merit the sacrifice that civilian and military alike have made.’
And the vice president’s: ‘You regret every casualty, every loss.’
Today, they acknowledged another number.
A bigger number.
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