My Take on "Acceptable Losses"

[FightingIrish]

OK. So 127 brave Americans paid the ultimate price last month in George W. Bush’s new strategy to buy time for his legacy. It wasn’t a record. It only ranked third in the list of bad months for our best and brightest. We have reached the point where only numbers matter. We have no time to focus on the tidal wave of devastation that each individual death brings to a family, a community and to our nation. We are still talking about what someone in high places considers “acceptable losses”.

Now that the military bases of our fallen are having to resort to monthly mass memorials to keep up with rapidly scrolling battle deaths, why not just put them in mass graves? The only individuals that matter now are the ones who avoided the call to sacrifice years ago and now send our children off to defend their honor by making the ultimate sacrifice.

If only we could reach beyond the grave and ask them if it was worth it. Was there a cause worth taking them from their families and their futures? Did dying a nearly anonymous death in a land where they are not even welcome make their sacrifice meaningful and worthy of our commitment to send more to follow them?

Politics is a horrible game to be playing when the stakes are the lives of young Americans who may have learned too late the cynical calculus that sent them in harm’s way. I will consider my support for our future leadership on the basis of their willingness to admit that this madness was terribly wrong no matter what position they took leading up to it. No, this time I won’t even forgive a misguided vote for a lunatic’s agenda. I want it to start clean and fresh in 2009, if we have to wait that long. I will not be swayed by a Hillary Clinton or a John Edwards who signed the check that we are paying in blood every single day. Their relegation to the trash bin of our political history is the only acceptable loss I am willing to concede.