Op-Ed Columnist: 117 Deaths Each Day: "The most deadly are automobiles, which kill 117 Americans a day, or nearly 43,000 a year. Then comes flu, which (along with pneumonia, its associated disease) kills 36,000 people. Third is guns: 26,000 deaths. Fourth, food-borne illness: 5,000. And finally, terrorism, which in a typical year claims virtually no U.S. lives - with horrific exceptions like 2001. But antiterrorism efforts get most of the attention and the resources.
... we need a balance in confronting threats, and I don't think we've found it. Watch President Bush's campaign ads, and it's clear that he's overwhelmingly focused on the war on terrorism — in 2001, he called it "my primary focus." As he put it this year, "I'm a war president."
... But America is too complex to have national policy reduced to the single overarching priority of counterterrorism."
- posted by geoff @ #