Might as well get it out of the way: This is a cruel, false, chicken-hearted attempt to smear Cindy Sheehan, the protesting mother who lost a son in Iraq.
That's not the intent, but that's how some will respond. Some people think that any time you argue back, you're Stifling Dissent. For them, merely discussing Ms. Sheehan's views is the rhetorical equivalent of sending her to Abu Ghraib.
Just for the record, then: She has the right to her opinions, she certainly has the right to her grief, and she has the right to say provocative things. She even has the right to ask for a second conference with the president in order to accuse him of killing her son. This is not about that. No one is suggesting she be stripped of the First Amendment and forced to sing patriotic Irving Berlin tunes.
Now that the preambles are done, a question: Is anything she says subject to criticism at all?
Your first response might be a wince and a shrug: Who are we to judge, the woman's clearly in pain, best to leave it be, please change the channel. But if she wants to be a spokesman for the anti-war cause, is it beyond the pale to examine her remarks? If she blames the war on, say, Zionist fiends, ought not one wonder why the anti-war crowd seems deaf or indifferent to the loathsome underpinnings of her remarks? Perhaps they agree with her when she says this is a war for Israel. David Duke certainly does.And why is it that some people take any criticism of Israel and its policies to be a racist stance? If someone was to criticize some African nation would people automatically assume that the critic hates blacks? If someone says something bad about an Arab nation, does one automatically assume they hate Arabs?
If asking those questions is too cruel, you'd best stop reading. Recently Democratic strategist Joe Trippi set up a conference call with anti-war bloggers, and Sheehan rolled out sheet after sheet of thin-hammered boilerplate.
See Byron York's National Review account, at http://nationalreview.com/york/york200508111811.asp: "Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state," Sheehan said. "Our government is run by one party, every level, and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government." Oh, please. When our elected representatives vote specifically to aid corporations and the ultra-rich to the detriment of the middle and lower classes again and again while the corporate controlled media distracts the public with "news" items like the Michael Jackson trial and a lost little girl in Aruba for weeks on end, it starts to look a little suspicious. Not to mention little news items like the Downing Street Minutes and other indications that this war was based on conscious deception that somehow don't really reach the same "newsworthy" status as this tripe.
It seems churlish to point out that the mainstream media -- you know, the papers and networks that relentlessly hype Iraqi progress and downplay casualties -- have helped make her a celebrity. It would be obvious to note that we went to war to depose an actual fascist state.And here we thought we went to war to prevent us from being attacked by someone who didn't actually have the capacity to attack us. Silly us. Or was it to avenge 911 on people who had nothing to do with it? Or was it because we really didn't like the dictator we used to support until he became a liability? Or was it to spread Democracy?--paying no attention to the fact that there are SEVERAL countries fairly local to Iraq that have terrible human rights records and brutal dictators...but no oil. Things that make you go hmmmm....
But she is right about one thing: The Internet is helpful. Thanks to the Web, we know that Sheehan spoke at a rally at San Francisco State University in April. It wasn't a Mothers Against Pre-emptive War With Ambivalent U.N. Approval meeting. It was a rally for a lawyer convicted of aiding Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the terrorist connected with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. There's a transcript at http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/Stewartrally.htm.
"The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush," Sheehan began. After calling for Bush's impeachment and making a demand that Bush send his "two little party-animal girls" to war, she makes this nuanced assessment:
"What they're saying, too, is like, it's OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. ... It's OK for Israel to occupy Palestine, ... for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it's not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. They're a bunch of (expletive) hypocrites."
The hard left in America needs to realize a bald, cruel fact: Anyone who sees no moral distinction between Israel and the mullahs of Iran, or sees the U.S. attempt to set up a constitutional republic in Iraq as equivalent to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, suffers from incurable moral cretinism. The more the fervent anti-war base embraces these ideas, the more they ensure that no one will trust the left with national security. Ever.And anyone on the Hard Right who assumes that the authority granted to a President by the public gives him and his cronies the right to ride roughshod over the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and the will of our allies for the sake of his corporate allies and sponsors is just terribly confused.
We should actively oppose ANYONE else getting nukes...of course, we can't even threaten Iran or N. Korea with any effectiveness now, since we're in a freakin' quagmire in a country we never should have invaded in the first place.
Setting up a Constitutional Republic... Is that what they're telling you? It will be an Islamic Republic, probably at least as bad as any of its neighbors in the long run...that is, if it doesn't degenerate into a full-scale civil war the minute our collective backs are turned.
What you on the right don't seem to get is that many of us rabble-rousers quite accurately predicted this current state of affairs BEFORE the war ever started. Taking a country and deposing a leader is a HELL of a lot different than occupying one.
If this administration wasn't made up of chickenhawks who play at war but have actually never fought in one and allegedly led by a man who reportedly has a real problem with listening to anything that might conflict with his opinions on any subject, whether he actually knows anything about it or not, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
And if you can't see that, you're about as hopeless as anyone on the left could ever be.
Will they learn the lesson? Even money says Sheehan will be sitting in the Michael Moore seat next to Jimmy Carter at the '08 Democratic convention.Who gives a damn?
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