When a war starts and you believe your enemy has weapons of mass destruction, maybe you decide not to start a precedent of hand signing letters of condolence because you don't know how many casualties will be coming in and at what point you may be forced by time contraints to stop doing it.
And the point at which you stop doing it will be a landmark of triumph for the enemy.
Same thing with the President. What if you went to every funeral? Wouldn't that be the decent thing to do?
At what point does it become impossible to do that, and which family is told their fallen soldier will be the first not honored by the presence of the President?
The deaths haven't been that much that he can't hand sign letters. I could understand if it was of World War Two proportions.
With all due respect , patriciaruth, that was the most convoluted and tortured rationalization for Rumsfeld's non-signatures I could conceive of.
"the point at which you stop doing it will be a landmark of triumph for the enemy"==
really, a Clinton Administration apologist could not have
come up with that. Please examine your reasoning up and down, left to right, top to bottom. And it should make NO difference WHO brought it up , and whose agenda is being served by casting aspersions on Rumsfeld. Once again, I will say, that if they HAD to sign those letters,they might come to see their policies as a little more, uh, let's say, "flawed". And frankly, from what I know about President Bush, and it's been very little reported, he has in fact met face-to-face with families of the war dead, and wept with them. Maybe what we're saying is it would be nice if he had someone in that post as feeling as himself.