Mrs. Sheehan

Judging from some recent comments, I am suddenly not very popular around here. I was going to reply in the comments but I wanted to link to a couple of other pieces.

Sugarchuck has consistently called for a hands-off, tolerant approach, based on who she is and what she has already given. I appreciate that. He and Silence would like to see commentators (especially me) lay off.

While I am also tired of vituperative attacks on Mrs. Sheehan by the right, I am NOT going to concede ground to her because I am not comfortable asserting my beliefs against one who has "laid such a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

Byron York details that she is the public face of one Lisa Fithian.

To anyone familiar with the world of professional protesting — protests against globalism, capitalism, war, police tactics, and dozens of other causes — the presence of Fithian is a sign of how far Cindy Sheehan has strayed from the roots of her "one mom" crusade against George W. Bush. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a sign that the "one mom" crusade was never just one mom. Fithian is a legendary organizer who operates in the world of anti-globalism anarchists, antiwar protesters, and union activists; an advocate of aggressive "direct action" demonstrations, she protested the first Gulf war, played an important role in the violent shutdown of Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, was a key planner in protests at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2000 and 2004, and organized demonstrations at trade meetings in Washington, D.C., Prague, and Genoa.

I can sit still when she lines up with Michael Moore, or Al Sharpton, but this alliance has me concerned. Dang them for putting a sympathetic face on lunacy. But I am not going to let them offer lies and denigrate the mission, because of her.

Silence doesn't seem very chipper either. As to his first point, that's the idea: comedy writers are penning better White House communications than does "White House Communications."

As for the "No WMD's" comment, I offer two rebuttals. The first comes from that crazy, right-wing, in the pocket of the Bush Administration magazine, The New Yorker. Nicholas Lemann wrote in February 2003:

Has a war ever been as elaborately justified in advance as the coming war with Iraq? Because this war is not being undertaken in direct response to a single shattering event (it's been nearly a year and a half since the September 11th attacks), and because the possibility of military action against Saddam Hussein has been Washington's main preoccupation for the better part of a year, the case for war has grown so large and variegated that its very multiplicity has become a part of the case against it. In his State of the Union address, President Bush offered at least four justifications, none of them overlapping: the cruelty of Saddam against his own people; his flouting of treaties and United Nations Security Council resolutions; the military threat that he poses to his neighbors; and his ties to terrorists in general and to Al Qaeda in particular.

My second defense is a plea to recall discussions we had over lunch. You thought that the Neo-Wilsonianism was a ruse and said that if you believed that they were serious about propagating democracy then you'd be on board. (This is all from memory, if I have it wrong tell me and I will retract everything I said.)

As for the Vietnam comparison, I don't see where that happened in this post but I am very interested in that. The assertion that "they didn't want is there" was constantly cited by the antiwar crowd, but my experience with South Viet Namese as completely orthogonal to that.

I have met a few families that came over after, and they really resent the inference that "the simple little rice farmer doesn't care if he lives under democracy or Communism." That is patronizing to the highest degree.

Freedom on the March Posted by jk at August 29, 2005 4:51 PM