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Monday, August 22, 2005
Sheehantics
Have the Old Media had enough of Cindy Sheehan yet?
Perhaps not, if Maureen Dowd can trumpet Sheehan's "moral authority" and Frank Rich can blather inanely about her "swiftboating" on the op-ed pages of the "paper of record." Google News turns up 11,000 sources that have reported on this mother of a dead soldier. Clearly, the media megaphone think they have a story by the tail here.
But what is the story?
Here are the facts, as your Curmudgeon has assembled them:
- Casey Sheehan was killed while on duty in Iraq in April of 2004.
- Shortly thereafter, the Sheehans met with President Bush. At that time, Cindy Sheehan described the meeting in positive terms.
- Quite recently, Cindy Sheehan has reneged on her original, positive description of that first meeting, and has begun to demand a second meeting with President Bush.
- Sheehan and her supporters are camped outside the president's personal residence in Crawford, Texas, and have been there for a number of days.
- Those supporters come from a broad swath of far-left and anti-war groups active in this country. Many of them have been active in opposition to other initiatives and policies of the Bush Administration.
- Sheehan herself has participated in rallies and activism with some of those groups. For example, at an April 27, 2005 rally in support of Lynne Stewart, the far-left attorney convicted of complicity in terrorist conspiracy, she said:
We are not waging a war on terror in this country. We’re waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.
[...snip...]
This country is not worth dying for. If we’re attacked, we would all go out. We’d all take whatever we had. I’d take my rolling pin and I’d beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if.... 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have.
Apparently, all of this is now very well known by anyone who's taken more than a surface interest in La Commedia Sheehana. Only two questions remain:
- What are her true motives?
- Will she succeed in securing a second meeting with President Bush?
One need not wonder about the motives of her supporters, who are members of left-wing groups with well documented histories. If she's using them for purposes of her own, then at the least those purposes are not antagonistic to theirs. Apart from her associations and her personal loss, we have nothing to go on.
There's no substance to grapple with in her accusations. One is either willing to accept that the Administration and its supporters in Congress were within their legitimate discretion in launching Operation Iraqi Freedom, or one is not. Beyond that choice, argument is impossible.
Sheehan's vitriol is self-evaluating. It's as shrill and pointless as anything else launched against the Bush Administration. She's offered up the vilest accusations possible against the president and his chief advisors. Not one possesses the merest shred of substantiation. That doesn't appear to trouble her, or her supporters, or the Old Media types who regard her as a figure of import.
Therefore, it's maximally unlikely that the president will agree to speak with her. What can she offer him except face-to-face vilification with the cameras rolling? The disservice to our troops, their families, and the nation's morale would negate the use of such an encounter, all by itself.
But let's allow her this much: She's given the month of August 2005 a lead story. August is a "traditional" dead-news zone. That's why the newspapers' silly-season columns always expand in August...and why La Commedia Sheehana belongs in their demesne.
Comments
How many meetings with the President is Ms. Sheehan entitled to? Are other mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan entitled to the same consideration? When did this become an obligation of the presidency?
Let me buy the Democratic operatives who are pushing this story a vowel: the refugees of the 60’s who are protesting down in Crawford and the transnational progressives who are pushing the story may be making the president look callous but they’re not covering the Democratic Party in glory. And it’s extremely unlikely that any member of the current Administration will be running for the Presidency in 2008. Both Republicans and Democrats will be running against Bush.
Democrats get nothing by promoting this story. Except a momentary expression of pique.
Posted by Dave Schuler on 08/22/2005 at 12:38 PM
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