Haiti Earthquake Impact on America in Context

The State Department told NBC news on Tuesday that there are still 5,500 missing Americans in Haiti. What the article does not mention is that no Americans have been pulled out of rubble alive in 2 days, and the odds of finding more survivors is very low.

Missing does not mean dead.

There are still no fixed estimates how many people were killed in the earthquake, but the UN is now saying they have already buried 50,000 bodies. That does not count the many thousands who died and are buried inside collapsed buildings.

I have not seen any estimates of how many of the estimated 250,000 wounded in Haiti were American, but there were an estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti at the time of the earthquake.

For context, there have been 4,373 American citizens killed in the Iraq war, and 962 Americans kill in the Afghanistan War.

With such an incredible loss of life, is anyone still curious why I have believed from the beginning this will be an enormous political challenge for the Obama administration? They are doing a great job, but cannot afford at any point to appear politically distracted from an event that potentially might represent the largest loss of American life in decades.