The republicans who continue to parrot the party line about Preznit More Cowardly Than Thee not attending funerals of fallen service men and women need to remember this:

In the days and months after Michael J. Deutsch was killed by a land mine as he drove an armored personnel carrier down a road near Baghdad International Airport, various reminders of his short life and untimely death came home to his parents in this Middle American river city on the Mississippi.

The First Cavalry shipped back his military belongings in a duffel bag and two boxes. Michael died on the last day of July last year, at 21, but the bag and boxes remained unopened for months. His mother, Ilene, said she was not ready for the wave of grief that would wash over her again if she sorted through the artifacts of her youngest boy's final days. The U.S. Army also sent home a Bronze Star, Michael's posthumous award, and his father, Wayne, wears the small star unobtrusively, without talking about it, pinned to the collar of his shirt.

From the state of Iowa, the Deutsch family received a perfectly folded American flag that flew for one day in Michael's honor above the Capitol in Des Moines. And from the White House came a letter of condolence signed by President Bush. Two letters, actually.

"The exact same one, twice," Wayne Deutsch noted dryly, sitting at the kitchen table of their wood-frame house in Dubuque's working-class North End neighborhood. "What does that tell you? It was a form letter."

That says more than all the words that can be written about this fucked-up conflict in Iraq. And the attitude of the Lying Coward who has gotten Michael Deutsch and 600 other servicemen and women killed and who knows how many more wounded and disabled for life. We know that they have pumped up the VA budget because they Love the wounded vets; they have shortened tours and cancelled redeployments for Active, Reserve and National Guard folks because they Love our troops. They expected a Rose Garden, they got a Sceptic System...and about 150,000 Americans are living in it. Indeterminately. Preznit Vendettas 'R' Us is a brave, brave man with the lives of other family's sons, daughters, husbands and wives...his TANG service proves it.

Ilene Deutsch listened to her husband's lament as she stood by the kitchen stove. For several hours, she had politely refrained from answering questions about the politics of the war. She was afraid of what she might say. Now it came flooding out, along with the tears. "They didn't have a clue what was going to happen once the war was over. No anticipation. Bush had no idea," she said. "I don't like George Bush. We are listed as independents, but I will never vote for him. Surely he didn't look at the long range. . . . He didn't have a clue."