Giftzweig chimes in with:

"Bush's Iraq Liberation! Almost as sob! deadly as falling outta bed!"

That's a lame and disingenuous and meaningless analogy. You're too
intelligent not to know that.

What - exactly - is "lame" or "disingenuous" about it?

Come now. Far from "meaningless," the analogy is decisively on-point;
several hundred casualties per year is entirely to be expected when the
enterprise in question is liberating 26 million people from the worst
sort of tyranny. If anything is "disingenuous," it's the effort on the
part of the pro-Saddam lobby to suggest that a piffling few hundred
casualties represents something terrible that America should be
concerned about.

You're asserting that 261 deaths in six months is a crushing,
significant figure that justifies radical changes in foreign policy and
government. I'm asserting that we must consider 261 deaths in the
appropriate context, and I'm proposing contexts for consideration.

For example, in a single year (2000), "accidental drowning and
submersion" claimed 3,482 American lives. 341 of these were accounted
for by "drowning and submersion while in or falling into bath-tub."

First, you're writing of a full year. Second, you're writing of a population of
300,000,000 where the 341 deaths occured, not a population of 140,000 or fewer,
which is where the 261 deaths occured.

As he said, disingenuous. It is not at all on-point.

What you're doing is something along the order of saying the 55,000 American
deaths during the Vietnam war wasn't much more than a single year's total from
auto accidents in the U.S., so, because the deaths in 'Nam occured over about
11 years, that's not so bad. Which is utter nonsense, just as your argument is.

Charlie Self
"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use
our power the greater it will be." Thomas Jefferson