We can't suffer the level of casualties we are currently enduring in Iraq and not expect it to
damage Bush politically.
A day-old paper sits in a puddle outside a two-story brick home. It has a front-page photograph of Donald Bucklew, his face contorted in agony and pitched toward the skies. A son had died in Iraq en route home for his mother's funeral, leaving Bucklew twice broken.
"Burying a wife and a son," reads the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline.
Amanda Cumming, a 24-year-old housewife whose neighbor had left the paper outside, shakes her head at the thought of the headline. It's enough to make her ill, maybe enough to turn her against Bush [...]
Since the war began, Bush's job approval rating has dropped about 20 percentage points -- to roughly 50 percent -- with shifts against the war found among most demographic groups [...]
A Pew Research Center poll says independent women supported any Democrat over Bush 49-26 percent in October -- a huge shift from April, when the same group backed Bush 46-27 percent.
The steady flow of dead Americans
is like Chinese water torture. Headlines like
these can't help but turn the public against the war.
A newlywed officer, a father of three, a single father and a father who never got to hold his newborn daughter were among the six soldiers killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash near Tikrit, Iraq, on Friday [...]
Rose had been in Iraq since spring. His daughter, Meghan Louise, was born July 31. The closest he got to her was watching her through a computer monitor. His wife, Michele, and father-in-law had hooked up a Web camera so Rose could watch her fussing and cooing from Roses' home in Fort Campbell.