Classy.

Last week, I speculated on how several conservative luminaries might respond to the 4,000 death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, which I assumed would occur "sometime in April."

I was insufficiently pessimistic.

Anyway, I always expect the worst of these people -- and I'm rarely, as a consequence, disappointed -- but I'm still surprised that the "Iraq is still safer than [major American city, preferably with lots of black people]" trope is in circulation.

Then again, I don't read A.J. Strata:

The ghouls in the liberal media are counting body bags as their way of ignoring the myriad indicators of progress in Iraq achieved over the last year. ...

...while we await the more important data, which will show the level of violence al-Qaeda can inflict in Iraq and which has been dropping as we and our Iraqi allies have purged the Islamo Fascists from Iraq, we can put the US effort in Iraq into some perspective. At this site are the mortality rates for the US, by state, for the year 2004. As can be seen the 5 years of fighting first Saddam and then al-Qaeda and their allies equals the annual death rate for Wyoming. It is a fraction of most US state death rates from just one year. In fact, more Americans died in the tiny city of Washington DC in 2004 than died in the entire Iraq war effort. To put it in even more perspective take a state like NY, and divide the annual rate by 12, and you get 12,000 deaths per month, which dwarfs the numbers lost in Iraq over 5 years.

Should we question A.J.'s patriotism? I think so. It seems to me to be the ultimate act of hatred for one's country to trivialize the deaths of so many of its men and women.

But that's just me.