CNSNews.com has been unafraid to politicize American military casualties in the past — remember that it repeatedly credited President George W. Bush for falling casualties (from a surge that he ordered) while blaming President Obama for increasing casualties in Afghanistan (made necessary because Bush largely ignored Afghanistan to focus on Iraq).
Which brings us to a Jan. 2 CNS article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman headlined “2017: Chicago Homicides Outnumber U.S. Military Casualties 18 to 1.” Yes, it’s a stupid point, but Chapman is fully committed:
There were 664 homicides in Chicago in 2017 and, for comparison, 37 casualties in the U.S. military in its myriad operations around the globe. That’s according to data from the Chicago Tribune and from the Department of Defense’s press office.
The Chicago deaths are for the period Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 31, 2017; the military deaths are from Jan. 1, 2017 through Dec. 22, 2017, which is the latest update on casualties by the DoD posted so far. (There may have been a few more military casualties in December.)
From the data available, it shows that Chicago suffered 17.9 times more homicides than the U.S. military worldwide — combat and non-combat related deaths — last year.
Of course, the U.S. military is not engaged in any major combat operations anywhere in the world. But that won’t keep Chapman from pressing his dumb analogy — after all, his allegiance is to political ideology, not to journalism.