Double Smackdown On Cindy Sheehan
Cindy Sheehan, the grieving nut case camped out near President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas has received a double smackdown today from two of the greats.
First, from Ann Coulter comes, Cindy Sheehan: Commander In Grief, where Ann makes the following case:
“To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son in the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch. It’s the strangest method of grieving I’ve seen since Paul Wellstone’s funeral. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn.
Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn’t have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on “Entertainment Tonight,” you’re no longer a grieving mom; you’re a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show.
We’re sorry about Ms. Sheehan’s son, but the entire nation was attacked on 9/11. This isn’t about her personal loss. America has been under relentless attack from Islamic terrorists for 20 years, culminating in a devastating attack on U.S. soil on 9/11. It’s not going to stop unless we fight back, annihilate Muslim fanatics, destroy their bases, eliminate their sponsors and end all their hope. A lot more mothers will be grieving if our military policy is: No one gets hurt!
Fortunately, the Constitution vests authority to make foreign policy with the president of the United States, not with this week’s sad story. But liberals think that since they have been able to produce a grieving mother, the commander in chief should step aside and let Cindy Sheehan make foreign policy for the nation. As Maureen Dowd said, it’s “inhumane” for Bush not “to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.”
I’m not sure what “moral authority” is supposed to mean in that sentence, but if it has anything to do with Cindy Sheehan dictating America’s foreign policy, then no, it is not “absolute.” It’s not even conditional, provisional, fleeting, theoretical or ephemeral.
The logical, intellectual and ethical shortcomings of such a statement are staggering. If one dead son means no one can win an argument with you, how about two dead sons? What if the person arguing with you is a mother who also lost a son in Iraq and she’s pro-war? Do we decide the winner with a coin toss? Or do we see if there’s a woman out there who lost two children in Iraq and see what she thinks about the war?
Dowd’s “absolute” moral authority column demonstrates, once again, what can happen when liberals start tossing around terms they don’t understand like “absolute” and “moral.” It seems that the inspiration for Dowd’s column was also absolute. On the rocks.” (Read the whole article)
The second slap comes from Mark Steyn in an article called, Hold Your Tears where he says:
“This year’s performer in residence is Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. Mrs Sheehan is now very anti-war and has pledged to stay camped out in Crawford all August until the President has the guts to come out and see her for a face-to-face meeting. So far he’s sent his national security adviser and deputy chief of staff out to see her, but that’s like Clinton sending Janet Reno and Sidney Blumenthal to Carly Simon’s party. These no-name stand-ins were trying to ‘bullshit us into submission,’ complained Mrs Sheehan.
Her son’s loss — like Max Cleland’s wounds — is supposed to put her beyond reproach. For as the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd informed us, ‘The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.’
Really? Well, what about those other parents who’ve buried children killed in Iraq? Linda Ryan lost her son, Marine Corporal Marc Ryan, to ‘insurgents’ in Ramadi: ‘George Bush didn’t kill her son,’ says Mrs Ryan. ‘Her son made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country…. George Bush was my son’s commander-in-chief. My son, Marc, totally believed in what he was doing.’
There are, sadly, hundreds of Linda Ryans across American: parents who buried children killed in Iraq and who honour their service to the nation. They don’t make the news. There’s one Cindy Sheehan and she’s on TV round the clock. She may not be emblematic of bereaved military families, but she’s certainly symbolic of media-Left desperation.
Still, she’s a mother. And, if you’re as heavily invested as Ms Dowd in the notion that those ‘killed in Iraq’ are ‘children’, then Mrs Sheehan’s status as grieving matriarch is a bonanza. I agree with Mrs Ryan: they’re not children in Iraq; they’re thinking adults who ‘made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country’. Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.
That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.
I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.
So, when Cindy Sheehan came into view, Bush-disparagers from Washington to Hollywood cried ‘Bingo!’ ‘Cindy Sheehan is my hero,’ says Christine Lahti, former star of TV’s Chicago Hope. ‘You can run, Bush, but you can’t hide. Her courage is waking up America.’ Evidently it woke up motion-picture personality Viggo Mortensen, who flew to Crawford on a pilgrimage to Mrs Sheehan. For the press corps, it’s not exactly the Spielberg/Clinton summer summit in the Hamptons, but it’s as close as they’re going to get.” (HT to Red State Rant, you will want to read the whole article)
The public is getting fed up with the left and their Main Stream Media allies who continue to promote their poster child. There is a light at the end of this tunnel though. Rush Limbaugh says the train is about to derail. Here is his statement:
“My friends, there’s another reason why the Sheehan thing is going to derail, why this train is going to derail, and that’s because look at who her public relations outfit is. It’s the mainstream press. They don’t have universal respect anymore. They don’t even have any concept of how they are harming her cause by championing it, but I want to talk about something larger here with you liberals. I know there are a lot of you here in the audience. We hear from you now and then, and it may be a waste of my time but I’m going to try it anyway. But I think you all need to look at things differently than you do. You need to take your focus off of government. You know how absurd it is for us to hear that a war is ignoble because the president’s kids aren’t there or because congressmen’s kids aren’t there? Do you know how irrelevant that is? Do you know who makes this country work? Can I ask you people on the left if you have the slightest idea who makes this country work? Because I’ll tell you, it’s not the president, I don’t care who he is, and it’s not Congress, and I don’t care who they are. The people who make this country work are the people, and they’re people you’ve never heard of. They are people unlike Cindy Sheehan, who are not seeking publicity, they are not seeking fame. They take life seriously. They try to mix their work and pleasure into a proper balance. They try to raise their kids the right way. They’re doing everything they can to follow the straight-and-narrow. They sometimes slip off, but the people who make this country work, the fabled average American. That’s who you liberals condemn, whether you know it or not. That’s who you impugn. It’s always been the case.”
The “average” American is tired of having their country, their military, their President, and their government besmirched by these wacko leftist parasites. “Average” Americans will hold the MSM responsible, and their credibility will continue to decline along with their readers and viewers.
