More on the general disrespect this administration is showing our dead soldiers:

"One of the most enduring memories from the funeral of my friend Michael Kelly, who was killed covering the war in Iraq for Atlantic Monthly, was standing by his open grave in a cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., watching an Army officer in dress uniform make his way through the cold, persistent drizzle and up the small hill to Michael's wife and boys. He spoke to the family quietly and then got down on one knee on the wet artificial turf that had been placed there in a vain attempt to shield the mourners from the earth. He gave the boys a flag and a medal.

Michael Kelly was not one of their own. He was brash and brave, but distinctly unmilitary. Yet the Army took pains to make this simple gesture that drove home the way the military honors death: it endows that inescapable but inescapably tragic part of their lives with a sense of moment, of ceremony and dignity, and most of all it faces death squarely and honestly."

-snip-

"The administration undoubtedly feels that showing coffins on television or having the president attend funerals would undermine public support for the war. (The ban on covering the arrival of coffins at Dover was in effect during the popular Afghanistan war, but was not enforced.) That seems like more of an acknowledgment of how fragile that support is than any poll yet taken.

The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that this president seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You cannot hide casualties. Indeed, trying to do so probably does more to undermine public confidence than any display of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at least one direct parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the United States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage."