Our president and 4,000 dead

We reached that bloody milestone this week. Hard to think about this war any longer. What a monstrous catastrophe this administration gave us--and gave us rather casually. We were told we would win easily--that we would be greeted as liberators--that the oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction. Now 800 billion later, 4,000 dead, and no end in sight.

Caught this from a C&L post about Dana Perino having to answer questions about how the President responds to these deaths. She assures us that he grieves each and every one, and stops and prays about that loss. He assures us that he is sleeping fine and has no regrets. MediaBloodhound chronicles the ways this President has shown little regret about those deaths--from his joking about WMD to this last announcement where the milestone found him cuddling up with the Easter Bunny.

As Edward M. Gomez pointed out in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Noted the British newspaper the Daily Express yesterday: "Bush larked about with a 6-[foot-tall] Easter Bunny yesterday [Sunday, March 23] as his troops mourned their 4000th death in Iraq. The grim milestone was reached after four U.S. servicemen were killed when their patrol in southern Baghdad was hit by a roadside bomb on Easter Sunday. The president was pictured hugging the [Easter Bunny] at the White House as children...took over the South Lawn for the [annual] Easter Egg Roll...."

The same post links to a stunning essay by E. L. Doctorow entitled, "The Unfeeling President" where he asks:

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster.

But his opening speaks to the vast difference between this president and some who have carried this burden in the past:

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.