SAME OLD STORY

The wingnuts have repeatedly downplayed our casualties in Iraq by comparing them to the death rates in some American cities. This is a VERY old tactic (from McMaster's book, Dereliction of Duty, p. 213) :

[McGeorge] Bundy planned to spend his last day in Vietnam, Sunday, February 7 [1965]... Viet Cong demolition teams infiltrated the advisor's compound and airfield at Pleiku in the Central Highlands...killed eight American servicemen, wounded more than one hundred others, and set fire to twenty aircraft... In the White House he and his staff had compared casualties in Vietnam to traffic-related injuries in the Washington, D.C., area and concluded that the numbers of American dead and wounded in the war were insignificant.