Hiding behind the numbers

Newscasters and commentators expressed cautious approval this week when Mr. Bush for the first time spoke in public about the actual numbers of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — very specifically enunciating "one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four" in Iraq (make that 1,867 as of this morning), "two hundred and twenty-three" in Afghanistan.

My cynical take on this is that the administration wants us to view Cindy Sheehan's loss from their perspective: Given those numbers, what's one soldier more or less?

The lesson of Cindy Sheehan and the other Gold Star families is that every lost life is painfully personal, and we need to make sure that Mr. Bush and his admirers are never allowed to forget that, in the words of a classic Rose Maddox song,

He was some mother's darlin'
He was some mother's son;
Once he was fair and
Once he was young!
Some mother rocked him,
Her darlin' to sleep . . .