07 February 2007
Death and Political Agendas
In recent news, at least nine deaths have been attributed to the cold snap enveloping the central and eastern United States right now. It struck me how that was a minor additional fact in the news about the cold weather, but if two soldiers were killed in Iraq by an IED, it'd be leading the Iraq news segment.
That got me started thinking about how little we hear of some human tolls. Take the European heatwave of the summer of 2003.
Certainly, it was news at the time, and there was attention paid to the deaths, but compared to the vociferous anti-war crowd, the silence is deafening. How bad was that heatwave- well, the casualties in Iraq pale in comparison.
"At the end of September 2003, the French National Institute of Health reported that in the first 20 days of August, heat had killed more than 14,800 people. During the peak of the heat, fatality rates topped 2,000 in a day."
We've been at war in Iraq for four years now, and we're looking at about one-third the KIA there compared to the heat related deaths in France alone in that heatwave. Which is worse, people dying of neglect because their relatives were on their socialistic society's mandated three week August vacation, or troops dying in the service of their country and for the people of a fledgling democracy?
If you go beyond France the death toll is truly staggering:
"Altogether, new data boost Europe’s heat-related mortality for the summer of 2003 by 17,000 over preliminary estimates, to a record 52,000 casualties."
That's practically Vietnam in one summer. People who could've been saved with air conditioning for God's sake. Yet people want to rail about the 'senseless loss' in Iraq, tell us how its all meaningless and 'too costly in blood and treasure'. Apparently, the anti-war crowd is all too eager to eager to use the deaths of our troops for their political agenda, but couldn't give a rat's behind about all those people who died tragically needless deaths in the european heatwave of 2003. It lays bare the truth.
That got me started thinking about how little we hear of some human tolls. Take the European heatwave of the summer of 2003.
Certainly, it was news at the time, and there was attention paid to the deaths, but compared to the vociferous anti-war crowd, the silence is deafening. How bad was that heatwave- well, the casualties in Iraq pale in comparison.
"At the end of September 2003, the French National Institute of Health reported that in the first 20 days of August, heat had killed more than 14,800 people. During the peak of the heat, fatality rates topped 2,000 in a day."
We've been at war in Iraq for four years now, and we're looking at about one-third the KIA there compared to the heat related deaths in France alone in that heatwave. Which is worse, people dying of neglect because their relatives were on their socialistic society's mandated three week August vacation, or troops dying in the service of their country and for the people of a fledgling democracy?
If you go beyond France the death toll is truly staggering:
"Altogether, new data boost Europe’s heat-related mortality for the summer of 2003 by 17,000 over preliminary estimates, to a record 52,000 casualties."
That's practically Vietnam in one summer. People who could've been saved with air conditioning for God's sake. Yet people want to rail about the 'senseless loss' in Iraq, tell us how its all meaningless and 'too costly in blood and treasure'. Apparently, the anti-war crowd is all too eager to eager to use the deaths of our troops for their political agenda, but couldn't give a rat's behind about all those people who died tragically needless deaths in the european heatwave of 2003. It lays bare the truth.
