good GRIEF!? Good Grief! is the display of personal biases evident in responses to this thread.

I'll say this again. I don't like Bush. He's an idiot at best, & this was in poor taste. So what? If you expect your president to be better than human, you're as dumb as he is & you've got the president you deserve. I have seen no evidence that he joked about the dead. He went "looking" for the WMD's that everyone's been getting on his back about for months on end. It was a joke. It was a lousy, unfunny, bad taste joke. Get over it. It wasn't a joke about the dead, it was a poor joke about the WMDs.

I think Bush is an idiot (did I already say that?), I won't attribute deliberate disregard & insensitivity to the man on the basis of this flimsy evidence. I can imagine that he does actually feel quite bad about all the US dead (Hey, SINS, nice piece of emotive journalism you quote there, BTW, all those names... Yank ain't they? I'm more concerned by the fact that the majority of UK deaths in the war 'proper' were caused by one Yank tosser on a jolly in an A10 who never seems to have been charged with anything. Great journalism, fucking lousy Truth - some other asshole who's forgotten the rest of the world exists as something other than either a target or a market, hey...). But it seems to me that way to many of you who are so quick to condemn would be far worse Presidents even than the cock-up merchant that Bush is.

Someone handed you a hard decision that was guaranteed to involve people dying, & you wouldn't know which why to run to get out of it... Kick the man (preferably out of office) for something that he's done (like lying through his back teeth), but spare us the indignation over something this inconsequential. This is a stupid faux pas that his PR people should have prevented. It didn't involve figuratively or literally putting a gun to someone's head & pulling the trigger.

Go to town on him because he lied to you about WMD's, about the reasons for the war, or about the fact that he couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery, never mind a country (& that costs lives indirectly, far more than you've lost in Iraq), but FFS don't waste your time over what is literally a bad joke!