Christopher Hitchens Calls Cindy Sheehan’s Protest Sinister Piffle.
OK, this is a pundit who like so many others, supported this debacle and his own twin sisters Hubris and Catastrophe keep reminding him about. But he pours another Gin
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?
No, not unless the entire war was a lie. In which case, you would have every right to stick the death of your child up the asses of the liars who provoked it. By the way, you are at a loss primarily because you are drunk right now. I am just guessing but bet I am right.
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.
Ooooh. Now there’s a compromise. Send someone else because Bush is a coward who cannot face a single distraught Mom without handlers and minders and script writers. You know Mr. Hitchens, the Pres could end this all with a jog or a bike ride to Camp Casey.
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.
What can I say about this except Hitchens is still drunk. Somehow comparing Lincoln and the Civil War with this debacle. Ms Sheehan isn’t rising up to say Bush didn’t live up to his promises. She is rising up to tell Bush he said this was noble and she wants to know what the noble cause was especially now that the whole kit and caboodle is about to collapse.
Finally, I think one must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. Casey Sheehan joined up as a responsible adult volunteer.
Is it me or does it seem like if there is anyone who could speak for a dead man it would be his mother?
Good God, the depth of the hubris out of the mouths of these right wing nutcases, many of them who still can’t admit that they supported Operation Kick the Hornet’s Nest, is beyond the pale.
All I can say is Go Cindy Go. Even Christopher Hitchens and his huge Eg…er..uh..IQ…uh…I mean vocabulary cannot stop the momentum of Cindy Sheehan.