Posted 10:34 AM by Floyd

Does the Democratic National Committee supply scripts for newscasters to read when reporting on the guerilla war in Iraq? On the way to work I was listening to CBS radio news. The announcer gave the latest casualty figures for American forces in Iraq, and said "this is the 52nd American casualty since May 1, when President Bush announced that major combat operations in Iraq had ended." I have heard that italicized phrase on CBS news damn near every day for the past month.

It's obvious that scriptwriter wants to bash silly President Bush for declaring combat operations fini before Americans stopped dying. But the phrasing is rather strange, since it suggests that "major combat operations" have not ceased. I have not heard of any bombings, or mass movement of armor or infantry, since April. If CBS News knows differently, they should speak up.

You have to be pretty damn ignorant of military history to imagine that a soldier killed every other day by a sniper or booby trap could constitute "major operations". How's this for a major operation: The Soviet conquest of Berlin in 1945 took a week and resulted in one million deaths. That's a death rate five orders of magnitude worse than what Americans are going through now.