For whatever reason, a casualty count moving into four digits is a story.

For me, every death is a tragedy. Why does it take so many people a certain number of caskets before they take notice?

So now that we’ve passed 1000 dead Americans in Bush’s huge mistake, Tom Ridge has stepped up to announce that we’re all going to die very soon (again) and that you shouldn’t pay any attention to any other news that might have happened today because it couldn’t possibly be more important than this.

They think we’re stupid. They think that if every time something bad happens they send Ridge out to say “We’re all gonna die!” it will distract us and we’ll just forget. The sad thing is, it’s been working.