Mother of dead soldier really pissed at Bush

what would be helpful to me (the aspiring, debater ) is to hear what anyone out there knows about our plans in iraq. i realize some of you will say, there isn't one!!! but does anyone out there know? just curious-i obviously don't pay as much attention as i should which is another reason why i tend to stay away from political threads.

August 16, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
Made for Air America
The radicalism of Cindy Sheehan.

How long can it be until Cindy Sheehan gets her own show on the left-wing radio network Air America? The mother of a 24-year-old killed in Iraq, who has camped out in Crawford, Texas, demanding a meeting with President Bush, has made herself the mouthpiece not of those many Americans skeptical about a war that has proven far more difficult than advertised, but of howling-at-the-moon, bile-spewing Bush haters.

Bush has always been lucky in his opposition, whether it be Al Gore or John Kerry and the Hollywood stars and MoveOn.org activists who surrounded him. Sheehan seemed an exception. She's a mother whose loss gives her the moral standing to question the war. Her request seems eminently reasonable ?- a mere meeting with the man who sent her son to war. But Bush is proving fortunate again, and no evil machinations by Karl Rove have been necessary. Sheehan has discredited herself.

She has charged that Bush ?- "that lying bastard," "that maniac" ?- killed her son. This is unforgivably sloppy moral reasoning. An Iraq insurgent killed her son (some outrage directed toward that killer would seem appropriate, but apparently Sheehan can't muster it). The Iraq war was congressionally authorized by bipartisan majorities. If Bush killed her son, so did Kerry, who voted to authorize the war. If supporting the war is tantamount to murder, someone should arrest Sen. Joe Biden for vocally supporting our continued presence in Iraq.

Maybe Sheehan's accusation is just the sloppy rhetoric of a grieving mom? No, she means it. On a July 12 posting on the left-wing website DailyKos.com, Sheehan raved that she was undertaking her protest "for all our brave souls (American or Iraqi) who have been murdered by the Bush crime family. I told my Congressman that he needs to speak out against the lies and murder." This is paranoia reminiscent of the Clinton-murdered-people charges of loony right-wingers during the 1990s. Except those people never got media attention, unless it was to discredit them.

In a conference call with antiwar bloggers last week, Sheehan said that without the Internet America "would already be a fascist state." She maintained that "the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government." And she referred to last year's presidential election as "the election, quote-unquote, that happened in November." Nothing would help Sheehan's cause more than an extended bout of dignified silence, of which she seems incapable.

As for her request for a meeting with Bush, it is a sham. She says she wants to ask Bush why her son had to die. But she already knows, or thinks she knows. She said in a recent speech, directed at Bush: "You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East."

Sheehan already met with Bush once before. The request for a second meeting seems mostly about publicity. It's the basis for her presence at Crawford that has drawn so many cameras. She obviously doesn't seek comfort from Bush, nor can she tell him anything that he can't already read in the press about how she thinks he should be "tried on war crimes and go to jail."

In the end, it isn't that Bush is lucky in his opponents so much that his opposition is poisoned by its own noxious passions. It's not an accident that the antiwar movement throws up leaders like Michael Moore, the dishonest filmmaker, and Cindy Sheehan. They reflect its own inability to distinguish between legitimate criticisms of the war and unhinged but emotionally self-satisfying attacks that will turn off most Americans. At a difficult phase in Iraq, it is especially important that the nation have a responsible, constructive opposition. Cindy Sheehan demonstrates that the Left is still incapable of providing one.

?- Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle
What's wrong with her Crawford protest.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 15, 2005, at 11:50 AM PT

Here is an unambivalent statement: "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

And, now, here's another:
[list] Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.[/list]The first statement comes from Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column of Aug. 10. The second statement comes from Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. It was sent to the editors of ABC's Nightline on March 15. In her article, Dowd was arguing that Sheehan's moral authority was absolute.

I am at a complete loss to see how these two positions can be made compatible. Sheehan has obviously taken a short course in the Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis and has not succeeded in making it one atom more elegant or persuasive. I dare say that her "moral authority" to do this is indeed absolute, if we agree for a moment on the weird idea that moral authority is required to adopt overtly political positions, but then so is my "moral" right to say that she is spouting sinister piffle. Suppose I had lost a child in this war. Would any of my critics say that this gave me any extra authority? I certainly would not ask or expect them to do so. Why, then, should anyone grant them such a privilege?

Sheehan has met the president before and has favored us with two accounts of the meeting, one fairly warm and the other distinctly cold. I have no means of knowing which mood reflected her real state of mind, but she now thinks she is owed another session with him, presumably in order to tell him what she asserted to the Nightline team. In pursuit of this, she has set up camp near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and announced that she will not leave until she gets some more face-time with our chief executive. This qualifies her to be described by Dowd as "a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for P.R." Well, I think I have to concede that if Dowd says you have a knack for PR, you have acquired one even if you didn't have one before. (I am not entirely certain, for example, that the above letter to ABC News would count as a delicate illustration of the said "knack.")

The president has compromised by sending his national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, down that Crawford road to meet the PR-knackish Cindy. Not good enough, exclaims Dowd. Hadley was pro-war and has even been described as a neocon! Clearly, then, the Sheehan demand is liable to expand the more it is met. President Bush must either find a senior staff member who opposes the war and then send him or her down the track to see if that will do. Or else he must, like the Emperor Henry of old, stage his own Canossa and attend on her himself, abject apologies at the ready. After all, we mustn't forget that we are dealing?-as was that emperor in his dispute with Pope Gregory?-with "an absolute moral authority."

What dreary sentimental nonsense this all is, and how much space has been wasted on it. Most irritating is the snide idea that the president is "on vacation" and thus idly ignoring his suffering subjects, when the truth is that the members of the media?-not known for their immunity to the charm of Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod in the month of August?-are themselves lazing away the season with a soft-centered nonstory that practically, as we like to say in the trade, "writes itself." Anyway, Sheehan now says that if need be she will "follow" the president "to Washington," so I don't think the holiday sneer has much life left in it.

There are, in fact, some principles involved here. Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don't have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive's ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders. Most presidents in time of war have made an exception in the case of the bereaved?-Lincoln's letter to the mother of two dead Union soldiers (at the time, it was thought that she had lost five sons) is a famous instance?-but the job there is one of comfort and reassurance, and this has already been discharged in the Sheehan case. If that stricken mother had been given an audience and had risen up to say that Lincoln had broken his past election pledges and sought a wider and more violent war with the Confederacy, his aides would have been quite right to show her the door and to tell her that she was out of order.

Finally, I think one must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. Casey Sheehan joined up as a responsible adult volunteer. Are we so sure that he would have wanted to see his mother acquiring "a knack for P.R." and announcing that he was killed in a war for a Jewish cabal? (a claim that has brought David Duke flying to Ms. Sheehan's side.) This is just as objectionable, on logical as well as moral grounds, as the old pro-war argument that the dead "must not have died in vain." I distrust anyone who claims to speak for the fallen, and I distrust even more the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the grief of those who have to bury them.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

candidone1 wrote:

How 'bout you start a photo thread and we'll get out all the pictures with American high ups shaking Saddam's hand.
That'll be a hoot!

Interesting point. I guess we know there's some water under the bridge since that hand-shaking all those years ago. Changing allies is the nature of the beast of foreign policy.

Seems Ms. Sheehan has changed as well.

Ticomaya wrote:

candidone1 wrote:

How 'bout you start a photo thread and we'll get out all the pictures with American high ups shaking Saddam's hand.
That'll be a hoot!

Interesting point. I guess we know there's some water under the bridge since that hand-shaking all those years ago. Changing allies is the nature of the beast of foreign policy.

Seems Ms. Sheehan has changed as well.

so then what's your complaint ?

if you read the entire text of the articale that claims her meeting with bush was a love fest, you'll find that she and her husband decided to put aside their personal feelings and act the way that they believed that their son would want them to.

Hmmmm......could it be that Michael Moore and George Soros are paying to bus in lefties to create a crowd around Sheehan?

One thing I am certain about.......Michael Moore and Soros....WON'T pay to clean up the **** they leave behind!!!!!

DontTreadOnMe wrote:

Ticomaya wrote:

candidone1 wrote:

How 'bout you start a photo thread and we'll get out all the pictures with American high ups shaking Saddam's hand.
That'll be a hoot!

Interesting point. I guess we know there's some water under the bridge since that hand-shaking all those years ago. Changing allies is the nature of the beast of foreign policy.

Seems Ms. Sheehan has changed as well.

so then what's your complaint ?

if you read the entire text of the articale that claims her meeting with bush was a love fest, you'll find that she and her husband decided to put aside their personal feelings and act the way that they believed that their son would want them to.

No complaint, really. She has an agenda, and it appears to me she acquired it at some point following her first meeting with Bush, because she clearly didn't have the vitriol flowing then.

I also found it amusing that she had previously posted the kissy-kissy picture on the family website, but taken it off the website now that she's camped out in Crawford.

DTOM,

sorry i have been away so long...busy, busy, busy. i agree that if we were to have more stories about the good things happening over there, that many would believe it was propoganda from the administration. ..

Nice post about agendas, DTOM <nods>

dragon49 wrote:

DTOM,

sorry i have been away so long...busy, busy, busy. i agree that if we were to have more stories about the good things happening over there, that many would believe it was propoganda from the administration. ..

no problema, d49.

maybe it would be seen as propaganda. but that hasn't stopped the bush administration from presenting other packages and epks.

that is what makes me skeptical of their assertions that "stuff is gettin' better".

either way, it certainly is worth a try, don't ya think ? :wink:

DTOM: I've no complaint about the fact she has an agenda. Did you not notice where I said that earlier?

She has as much right to push her agenda as the next person. And the anti-war-left-fringe in this country has the right to ride Momma Sheehan for all the mileage they can get out of her ... and you know they will.

and what then do you call it when bush has the parents of a soldier killed in action at the state of the union and all ?? oh. wait, i get it. that's gin-yoo-wine care and respect with no agenda or manipulation. right? i said, right??


As far as the shotgun totin' neighbor, he's got every right to hunt dove from his front porch as the next guy. That's legal in my county too ... though it'd be quail. :wink:


ahh, he was right out by the fence line. they showed the truckbed with his scattergun and a 1/2 rack of that god awful keystone crud (i thought at first it was bud light. the guy has even less class than i thought ) sitting on top of the cooler. cracked open and sportin' a pretty good dent. in the interview with the guy, he was showin' a pretty good dent too. hahaha!

two other things...

1) idiots that mix beer with guns are the exact reason that we need gun control. i like both. quite a bit actually. but not together. why ? cause idiots like him are the result.

2) he supposedly is renting space to a network to shoot footage. not sure which, yet. know it's not msnbc. don't really care either way. he's a hypocrite as well as a fool.