Out of sight? Is he out of his mind?
As pointed out by Mark Gibson among others today, the government’s policy against showing the public any even abstracted images of the death toll from this administration’s adventures in the Iraq and Afghanistan is telling. That attempts are made to use the families of the fallen and an invocation of patriotism to justify this censorship should be offensive to any thinking person. The red, white and blue smokescreen continues.
A piece from this past December 31st looked at the long-standing media ban on the return of dead soldiers to the US while a conflict ongoing, including policies that go back into the 1990s.
It’s worth noting that Bush’s approach towards public appearances relating to the fallen is strongly evocative of that held by Viet Nam era presidents. One could reasonably argue that were he to attend one such event, be it a cargo plane loaded with bodies and/or wounded, he would be compelled to attend all of them lest someone feel snubbed. Of course, that there are so many such events to avoid should also give him a clue that something's wrong...
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