This story has been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere. As I write this entry, the story is ranked at number 11 on What’s Making Blog News and earlier in the week it was ranked highly by Blogdex. In short, when President Bush learned that teenager Ashley Faulkner had lost her mother on 9/11, he asked her how she was doing and gave her a hug. The response? Her father said “[T]his was the real deal. I was really impressed. It was genuine and from the heart.”

What does it say about our president that American citizens are impressed when he does what any feeling human being should do in such a situation?

Sen. James Inhofe thinks it’s no big deal when the U.S. tortures people: “Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.” There’s just one inconvenient hitch: Up to 90% of Iraqi detainees arrested by mistake, Red Cross says.

It’s official. America has jumped the shark.

Via Crooked Timber, where I have been running my mouth in the comments section.

See also:

• Financial Times
• NY Times
• Washington Post
• CNN
• The Guardian
• The BBC

Via the Washington Post:

While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action — more than 100 so far in April — doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.

More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes — injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month’s injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.

Meanwhile, as the president of the United States asks young men and women to make sacrifices he never made in support of a questionable-at-best war, the Bush campaign’s flying monkeys have the audacity to try to make Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s service in Vietnam an issue. It’s not that I think only war vets should be president, but if you weasel your way out of the draft and then embroil your country in the kind of conflict you were avoiding, then the word “hypocrite” only begins to capture what kind of person you are.