KABUL – A roadside bomb and gunfire attack killed a U.S. service member in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, a death that pushed August into a tie with July as the deadliest months of the eight-year war.
The death brought to 44 the number of U.S. troops who have died in Afghanistan this month with four days left in August.
NY Daily News adds:
The President has no calls or meetings on his schedule at the moment, presidential spokesman Bill Burton said, but he is staying up-to-date with developments on the economy, health care and foreign policy.
Burton hit back at Republican critics who said Obama should forgo his week-long vacation when many Americans are struggling economically.
"As I recall, the previous President took quite a bit of vacation time himself, and I don't think anyone bemoaned that," Burton told reporters, referring to George W. Bush's month-long summer getaways.
Well, um, I think quite a few people did "bemoan" that, including embedding references in just about every Hollywood movie made at the time.
I guess the theory goes that as long as Obama didn't vote for the war (did he vote to de-fund it?) he can ignore the consequences.
Subtracting out the blacks who voted for him simply because of his color, and the airheads who voted for him simply because Jon Stewart told them to, and the potheads who voted for him because any Democrat is more likly to easy pot laws than any Republican, and so on*... there are still a sizable number of people who voted for him due to their own opposition to the war (both of them, and the war on terror generally). What must those people be thinking now?**
* and don't forget disrespected parents of twenty somethings hoping to get back into the good graces of their drifted-away children (yes, I know some of them).
** not that I agree with them. While the war may have been tactically wrong, it was hard to find anyone in the days after 9/11 that didn't think we needed to do *something*. Meanwhile so many of the objections: "all about oil", "all about Haliburton", "can't impose democracy" seem to have run afoul of reality.
