Cindy Sheehan, the mother of Casey Sheehan, an American soldier who was killed in Iraq ⊠"
That's the sentence Cindy Sheehan and her increasingly lugubrious PR machine want every story to begin with. Nobody likes the idea of criticizing a woman who's lost her son in such circumstances. The hope has been that the high wall of Sheehan's "moral authority" will allow her to say whatever she pleases and nobody will say boo about it for fear of seeming insensitive to what must be unimaginable anguish, even though many of her supporters must realize her anguish has caused her to find meaning in a wildly partisan, orchestrated publicity stunt.
What's interesting is that Sheehan represents simply the latest installment in a long, nasty, desperate, ideological campaign which demonstrates â thankfully â the limits of identity politics logic.
Anybody who's been on the receiving end of the "chickenhawk" epithet knows what I'm getting at. Various definitions of chickenhawk are out there, but the gist is "coward," "unpatriotic hypocrite," etc. The phrase is less an argument than it is an insult.
It's also a form of bullying. The intent is to say, "You have no right to support the war since you haven't served or signed up." And this arguement is presented by the Left? the ones too good to serve? It's a way to get supporters of the Iraq war, the war on terror or the president simply to shut up. But there's a benefit-of-the-doubt to be given. There are many people who believe the "chickenhawk" thing is intellectually serious.
Obsessed with "authenticity" and the evil of hypocrisy â as they see it â they think the message and the messenger are inextricably linked. Two plus two is four, only if the right person says so. We see this logic most often in the realm of identity politics, where the statements of women, blacks, Jews, et. al. are given more weight for the sole reason they were born female, black or Jewish. People who grew up poor are supposed to have a more "authentic" perspective on economic policy than people who didn't, and so on. Interesting points on a broader scale.
Don't get me wrong: Experience is important and useful, including the experiences that come from being black or gay or any other member of the Coalition of the Oppressed. But valuable experience confers knowledge; it doesn't beatify. Identity isn't an iron cage. It is not insurmountable. And at the end of the day, arguments must stand on their own merits regardless of who delivers them. Hmmm.... How ...logical!
Indeed, the notion that there is a single, authentic, black perspective strikes me as fundamentally racist in its essentialism. And the idea that women adhere to a female logic unique to them strikes me as definitionally sexist. But the left doesn't care, because this perspective is indispensable for attacking "inauthentic" blacks. What was it that Harry Belafonte said the other week? That blacks who work for the Bush administration are, in effect, "race traitors" akin to high-ranking Jews in the Hitler regime (never mind no such Jews existed).
The chickenhawk charge is the misapplication of the same already faulty logic. There are war heroes who oppose the war and there are war heroes who support it. John Keegan is the greatest living military historian and he never saw a day of battle. George McGovern flew 35 combat missions in World War II. I'll take Keegan's guidance on military matters over McGovern's any day.
Maureen Dowd wrote of Sheehan in The New York Times this week that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." Either this is a truthful but meaningless platitude or it's a charge made in grotesquely bad faith. How about meaningless AND in bad faith? Not so fast Maureen! I had a son who served and Mother and I worried for six months. We have ZERO moral authority? Come over here and tell that to Mrs. Bobby; I want to videotape it! Surely Dowd recognizes that there are a great many mothers of fallen soldiers who believe the war was worthwhile. Is their moral authority absolute, too? If so, then moral authority can't really be very relevant to public debates. Or does Ms. Dowd claim that only those moms-of-the-fallen who say things critical of George Bush have absolute moral authority? Only the ones Maureen says have absolute authority. She'll judge, one by one.
If that's the case, does Dowd truly believe â as Sheehan seems to â that this war was fought to line the pockets of Texas oilmen and to serve the interests of a treasonous Zionist cabal inside the United States? I think that's batty and I'd need proof to believe it. Sheehan's word isn't good enough for me on anything â save the fact that she loved her son.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/18/2005 12:28 ||
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That shrill idiot harpy Dowd is an ass. Always has been always will be.
#4
I wonder if Dowd would support the 'moral authority' of a father of an adult female who died from complications incurred during a legal abortion [and it does happen]. Suddenly we'll see the right of the adult female is more important than the father's 'moral authority'. It would be a contradiction if the real fact wasn't that this is all about POWER to rule.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Posted by: Steve ||
08/18/2005 10:31 ||
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True enough. The Democratic establishment will hang themselves with Sheehan yet. It'll be ugly when she is abandoned by them and is institutionalized or offs herself. Alot of these things end up that way.
As far as most Americans are concerned, the last jihad activity in the United States took place on September 11, 2001. But jihadists undeniably continue to be quite active in America. A number of incidents in the last few days indicate that they are still trying to pull off an attack on the scale of the July 7 London bombings â or worse.
⢠Two Southern California converts to Islam, Gregory Vernon Patterson and Levar Haney Washington, are being held on suspicion of planning terror attacks in the Los Angeles area. Patterson and Washington were allegedly hoping to commit mass murder at a military recruitment office in Santa Monica and other locations on September 11, 2005 and other dates. Investigators found literature about jihad along with weapons and military equipment in Washingtonâs apartment; and Washington claimed that he and Patterson belonged to a group named Jamaâat al Islam (Party of Islam), a jihadist group in Californiaâs prisons (Washington served several years in prison on an attempted robbery conviction; he was released in November 2004).
⢠Working from information discovered in the investigation of Washington and Patterson, Los Angeles officials arrested a Pakistani named Hammad Riaz Samana. He seems to have been involved in terror plots targeting, among other places, the Israeli Consulate and the California National Guard.
⢠Lodi, California imam Shabbir Ahmed agreed to accept deportation to his native Pakistan on immigration charges. However, this case was not all about immigration: Ahmed and several others in Lodi allegedly planned to establish a madrassa, or Islamic school, there that would be used, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, âto recruit individuals to engage in jihad.â When asked if he believed that Ahmed was involved in planning a terrorist attack, agent Gary Schaaf responded: âThatâs some of the information that has been provided to us.â
⢠A document leaked from the New York State Office of Homeland Security and published in the Times of London last Sunday revealed that âAl Qaeda leaders plan to employ various types of fuel trucks as vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED) in an effort to cause mass casualties in the US (and London), prior to 19 September. Attacks are planned specifically for New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It is unclear whether the attacks will occur simultaneously or be spread over a period of time. The stated goal is the collapse of the US economy.â
⢠A map of the Washington Metro subway system was posted last Thursday on an Internet site that has been linked to Al-Qaeda. The poster noted that a chemical weapons attack in the Washington subways would bring âamazing resultsâ and advocated attacks in the U.S. on the scale of the one executed by Muhammad Atta.
⢠Three men described as being of âMiddle Eastern descentâ were spotted videotaping facilities in Santa Monica, California. Tourists? Unlikely. Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts explained: âOrdinarily, when tourists videotape, they donât videotape security structures for an extended period of time. They donât focus on access roads, and usually, the tourists themselves are in the photographs to document they were there, and thatâs not what these photographs showed.â
⢠Meanwhile, while agents are busy monitoring jihadist activity in the United States and trying to head off attacks, some officials were tied up for hundreds of hours investigating false claims made by a Chicago Muslim named Abdul Rauf Noormohamed. Noormohamed told agents that some of his relatives were members of Al-Qaeda, and were planning large-scale attacks in Chicago. What benefit would Noormohamed have possibly seen in tying up agents in this way? Well, as the Muslim Prophet Muhammad remarked, âWar is deceit.â By sending investigators on wild goose chases, Noormohamed diverted attention and manpower from legitimate terror investigations. Last Monday he pled guilty to charges of misleading agents, and is facing five years behind bars.
And all this is just from the last week. It indicates that the threat of new Islamic terror attacks in the United States continues to be very real. As stories like these become more and more common in the nationâs newspapers, it becomes more and more difficult for the mainstream media to sustain its indifference to the ways in which jihadists (inside prisons and elsewhere) use core teachings of Islam to recruit and motivate terrorists. And until the media â and more importantly, government and law enforcement â confront this phenomenon and try to formulate effective means to meet the challenge it represents, every new week will bring more stories of this kind. At least until one of the jihad groups in the United States actually accomplishes its goal.
Posted by: ed ||
08/18/2005 10:18 ||
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I believe not an instant passes where the Islamists aren't planning our complete destruction.
The most impressive result in the WoT so far has been the fact that nearly 4 years have gone by since that awful day and nothing in the US has been boomed. Although we are barraged on a daily basis by revisionists, liars, and idiots who believe everything that is being done to prevent that is wrong, there are a whole lot of people doing the right thing to protect the US day in and day out and that is readily apparent to me.
#2
We have had a handful of shooters, though. At LAX and the DC "snipers" for example.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/18/2005 12:09 Comments ||
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Valid point RC, I've always suspected the snipers were jihadis - but I see a difference between wackjobs taking potshots which I don't think is preventable and more sophisticated attempts at mayhem.
#4
Until the do gooders suffer losses of their own. They will continue their crusade for the Bill of Rights. I don't think the Founding Fathers had Nuclear-Terrorism to contend with in 1783.
#5
Don't forget the US Army muslim convert who in 2003 waged jihad by throwing grenades into the officer's tent in Kuwait.
Posted by: ed ||
08/18/2005 14:35 Comments ||
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but I see a difference between wackjobs taking potshots
So do I. That's why the Columbus "sniper" wasn't included in the list.
The DC "snipers", however, were Muslim, expressed jihadist sympathies, and received cash and false documents from someone.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
08/18/2005 15:05 Comments ||
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Even with a 1000-ship Navy, a national draft, GMD, or the Death Star(s), etc, there is still no such thing as absolute security or safety, as we are dealing with fanatic whose only working rationale is power for the sake of power, and whom have no qualms dusguising or misrepresenting themselves, their loyalties, andor their causes - you know, ARMY OF GOD or LIONS OF GOD/JIHAD. Iff Radic Islam is just a PC diversion for the Clintons and Commies as I believe they are, they gottan know Communist Fascist = Fascist Communist <> Fascist/Communist, Commie Russia-China will never allow any Global Islamist/Jihadist State no matter what they promised or agreed to.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., seemed clueless on the issue. "Meet the Press's" Tim Russert flummoxed the senator when Russert asked, "What would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned?" McCain's response? "I don't know. I don't know what would happen because I don't think it's going to be..."
USA Today conducted a state-by-state analysis. Their analysis expects 11 "conservative states" to immediately pass laws prohibiting abortion. But those "conservative states" only had 122 abortion providers in 2000, less than 7 percent of the nation's 1,819 abortion providers...
Right now, while abortion still exists in its "legal" form, those opposed to abortion have effectively eliminated "safety" across much of the country that frowns on abortion. That is, those doctors who perform abortions are generally a bad lot, eccentric at best and incompetant butchers at worst.
In addition, there is a clear and proportional relationship between widespread abortion and, after a 16-17 year interval, a significant drop in the major violent crimes rate. Several academic statistical studies have established this as fact.
Neither the "pro life" or "pro choice" sides has made much mention of these studies, as they have an obvious taint of eugenics about them, to the pro-choicers, and the breeding of a vicious criminal class as the reward for forcing life on unwanted children, to the pro-lifers.
So does it come down to different social policies between the "red and blue" states? It would appear that through the natural evolution of Roe v. Wade, that is the position that has been adopted: widespread abortion availability in blue states and effective curtailment in many of the red states, with "purple" states varying one way or another.
In the absence of Roe v. Wade, the abrogation of the primary federal policy, this status quo remains. The battle over abortion returns to the US congress as both sides fight pitched battles to force their will on the "other" half of the country. But is this any different than how things are now?
Unless anti-abortion states force pregnant women to stay home, they can with some small expense travel to where abortion is legal. If this is the case, funds will be raised to help them do so.
So in the final analysis, 'Roe' is an imbalance in a predominantly red state country. As such, it has real prospects to be overturned, but the end result will most likely be just screaming, rather than any tangible change.
Ironically, as its rationale for 'Roe' is the often quoted "right to privacy", a "right" severely trampled on since it was first asserted by the SCOTUS. The question, that if 'Roe' is overturned, do Americans have *any* "right to privacy" is a very serious and contemporary one. Privacy issues have become enormously important across our social and legal spectrum.
So will the SCOTUS, in their opinion overturning 'Roe', offer any support at all to the promulgation of privacy as a constitutional right? That could prove to be an equally divisive issue.
#2
"The battle over abortion returns to the US congress"
Wrong!! The fight goes to the individual states, where it belongs. Let the majority of citizens of each state, decide for themselves. Yes, you've guessed it, majority rules or Federalistic Republic Democracy.
#3
Planed Parenthood is all about eugenics. Check out the founders and the date ot was founded. Eugenics was the mantra of the left eastern elites.
My state would still allow abortions. No matter what the Federal government might do. My wife and I planed our Childs birth. We didn't need help to do that. We didn't need governmnet help to do that. But we are educated. Guess who goes to Planed Parenthood people who don't plan to well.
#5
What would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned?"
Comet hits earth and destroys civilization, moonbats fly to infest a new planet, baby ducks and chicks toasted in place.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/18/2005 19:11 Comments ||
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What would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned?"
Very little. A plane ticket from anywhere in the US to California, Illinois or New York costs very little. All three would allow all the abortions SCOTUS would allow, including PBA. None of these states would outlaw abortion. So, the few poor people from states that make abortion illegal who couldn't afford to get there would end up having a child and putting it up for adoption or raising it.
The question would then shift to SCOTUS being pressured to declare when life begins in an effort to protect the 14th Amendment rights of the unborn. States like California that make it murder for a person (such as Scott Peterson) to kill an unborn child would then have a hard time explaining the difference between abortion and murder.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
08/18/2005 19:25 Comments ||
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Whats there to overturn - adult women had the right to abortion long before ROE VS WADE. The real issue for me is NON-ADULT, MINOR-AGED WOMEN, aka children, teens or non-legal aged dependents, being allowed to have abortions without so much as Notice andor Consent to their legally adult parents, guardians, or sponsors. ROE,etc. > INFANTICIDE-INDUCED/BASED STATUTORY ADULTHOOD AND STATE SOCIALISM. Survey after survey has shown that most females who have abortions ARE NEITHER MINOR NOR FINANCIALLY STRAPPED. The only thing ROE accomplished was to teach generations of impressionable female youths that they automatically become legal adults once they successfully get themselves pregnant, be it at age 10 to age 17, with all the rights of adults plus the benefits of the State welfare system. Its NOT the dropout, poor teenage girl with the runaway boyfriend(s) whose having most of the abortions in America, because she needs more kids to qualify for State of Federal assistance : its the stable, working adult woman whom can pay for her own abortion, or else has easy access to payment options, thats having the abortions. The Lefties love ROE because its Big Govt, free taxpayer money flowing like a sewer or at the UNO, and false or misleading information, i.e propaganda, ...etal.issues - you know, Left-beloved, Left-alleged "the TRUTH"!?
#8
Mrs. D - I am perplexed by your response. Limiting abortion to three states would be a significant change, and, in my view a correct one.
You say a plane ticket would cost very little, yet you bring up the "the few poor people from states that make abortion illegal who couldn't afford to get there would end up having a child and putting it up for adoption or raising it." I am sure Planned Parenthood would have a bake sale or something to insure that the killing of infants persists. Otherwise, they go out of business.
I am sure glad my grandmother, who raised 13 kids during the Depression, didn't have the abortion "right" available to her at the time. Although, killing infants at that time would have been labeled as such.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/18/2005 23:05 Comments ||
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What Happens If Roe V. Wade Is Overturned?
The winning margin Republicans enjoyed in 2004 would disappear.
And I disagree that all women would simply give birth and put babies up for adoption. Some would do this; but some would likely try to abort them themselves (leading to both fetus and mother dying); others would leave them in garbage cans and toilets. We have enough history behind us to understand this, but if that's too removed for folks, all we have to do is look in today's news-we've seen numerous stories of dead fully-developed babies in dumpsters and toilets in states with "no questions asked" infant-drop-off laws.
Since time immemorial women have resisted being forced to breed/raise children. Only an understanding of the value of autonomy will frame this correctly. There is no other thing on Earth like pregnancy, so it is impossible to draw an exact analogy. But for those out there who oppose abortion, ask yourselves this: if the government forced you to donate a kidney or a lung (like birth, a physiological change with sometimes lifelong medical repercussions), would that be ok? Itâs all to preserve a life, after all. As many libertarians as I've seen on this site, I doubt you think it would be ok for the government to force you to give up your kidney, force you to give up your autonomy. An overturning of Roe-Vs-Wade and the subsequent outlawing of abortions in some states would amount to governmentally mandated childbirth.
The question, the problem emerges at an earlier point than pregnancy-it starts with not living by one's own ideals. If you are pro-life, you must live with all the consequences of your own actions and not shove them off on your sexual partner. You lose your right to protest if your word and deed do not match. If you believe all life is sacred, then you accept lifelong responsibility for your creating it in another, vulnerable human being. If you do not take ownership of both contraception and the risk of contraceptive failure, you accept the possibility of another choosing abortion. A man and a woman are equally culpable in sexual recklessness; women are long past the time when they will accept menâs share of the blame.
Conversely, if you are pro-choice, you must define and accept, open-eyed, the consequences of your actions. What are the dictates of your religion? How do you define the beginning of life? If you are Christian, how do you reconcile âthou shalt not killâ and your actions? If this year life is self-sustaining at x number of weeks, but next year, because of medical advances, it is self-sustaining at x-2weeks, how do you ever find a way to reconcile when a fetus is a group of cells and a fetus is a human being?
The closest thing we have to a solution is to live by your own morals and stay out of your neighborsâ business. We will all answer to God in the end. All you can do is be true in your relationship to your God.
If you go to the link, you'll have to page forward to page 15. So the whole thing is here. Cindy Sheehanâs supporters want you to call her Mother Sheehan â not because she conducts herself in a saintly manner, nor because nurture defines her nature, but because it makes her an easier sell. Hereâs Internet activist, âdataguyâ:
âWe should call her âMother Sheehanâ ... âMother Sheehanâ is her title, and expresses her ceremonial status as a bereaved mother, calling forth over the dead body of her son. She is not a person now, she is a mother, which is not an expression of her individuality, but rather the expression of her eternal character: the mother, the bringer of life who has been wronged by state power.â
More of this drivel is elsewhere on these pages.
I think I reached my saturation point with Mother Sheehan sometime yesterday afternoon. I'm going to start working on the Acme Boredom Meter⢠now...
This vaporous encomium I don't know what that means either. Look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls!
Think "too much beans at a sitting"...
makes explicit what many have suspected from the start: Cindy Sheehanâs backers and financiers do not consider her a âperson.â To them, she is a useful idiot, whom they will adore until the TV cameras go away. Ouch.
Reporters get the joke, OUCH.
which is why they treat her with a wary sensitivity normally reserved for aggressive panhandlers. After all, this is a woman who has likened terrorist lawyer Lynn Stewart to Atticus Finch in âTo Kill a Mockingbirdâ; who has done Dick Durbin one better by calling the president the most prolific mass murderer alive; who has earned the praise and admiration of David Duke by calling Operation Iraqi Freedom a âwar for Israelâ; and who has accepted support from Code Pink, an organization that advocated aid to terrorists in Fallujah. Journalists Clearly, Mr. Snow is referring to real journalists here
would rather gargle acid than listen to such gormless hey, I just copied it here; I'll look it up later.
gibberish, which is why they primly avoid asking her questions about her beliefs. Even her personal recollections seem dotty and odd. When she and her husband met with President Bush in June 2004, she greeted the commander in chief by asking: âWhy are we here? Weâre both Democrats. We didnât vote for you. Weâre never gonna vote for you!â So that's why she forgot about her previous meeting, she thought it was a fund raiser!
Not only is she a Dem, but she apparently puts all things under the political heading, to include death and destruction. Michael Moore, her good friend, did the same thing in the wake of 9-11, pointing out that most of those in the WTC hadn't even voted Republican, so why were they the ones to get it?
Meanwhile, she never talks in detail about her son â other than to mention that he is dead. This is not how grieving moms express their âeternal character.â Itâs what happens when people get utterly carried away with politics, transforming themselves from concerned citizens into boorish zealots. Her âwhy are we hereâ remark does set a tone, however, and those of like minds and sensibilities have joined Mother Sheehan in her demand that Bush alter his vacation plans, so he can hold another audience with her. These fellow squatters include a man who refers to himself as Mr. Foot Massager. Mr. Foot Massager massages feet. Actually, he limits his ministrations to two feet, both of which belong to Mother Sheehan. He has become her designated bunion kneader. The Merry Band also includes Patient Zero, a young fellow with a shock of hair the color of Tang. He has decorated his classical guitar with a sign, âMy other guitar is a syringe,â and a cryptic, spraypainted equation: â1001 = 0.â He also comes equipped with a placard, which he held as the president drove by: âHonk if your kids are in Iraq.â The same goes for the cadre of nostalgic malcontents, which includes septuagenarian ex-war protesters, a confirmed beatnik and some people who regularly wear shoes. Their bodies are there, but alas, most of them abandoned their minds in 1968. That hadda hurt!
The âPeaceful Occupation of Crawford,â as Sheehan has dubbed it, seems a protest less against war than against good manners, deodorant soap and the march of time. Yet the most heart-rending feature of the entire spectacle is Cindy Sheehan herself. She seems to believe this transient crew will help her piece together her shattered life â a dead son, a wrecked marriage, a shredded family. But how long can one lean on people who donât even call themselves by their own names? Sheehan, taking her moment in the sun far too seriously, recently declared, âI am the spark the universe chose.â Wow. That's telling!
That might be more true than she realizes. Like an ember whirling into the night sky, her spark will ascend, then darken, leaving behind a peacenik version of Courtney Love â an ashen specter you might expect to see standing by a roadside, bearing a hand-lettered sign: âI was somebody. Once.â
Yeah. Andy Warhol mapped out her entire career path.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/18/2005 12:28 ||
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Tony Snow just did a snowjob on the Mother of Bl..oopps that is bad form ... umm let's just say Tony really kicked-in the tiny nads of the Left. Ummphh!
#2
These fellow squatters include a man who refers to himself as Mr. Foot Massager. Mr. Foot Massager massages feet. Actually, he limits his ministrations to two feet, both of which belong to Mother Sheehan. He has become her designated bunion kneader.
#11
Before the vigil, Gary Qualls, of Temple drove to Sheehan's camp site and removed a wooden cross bearing his son's name. He said he supports the war and disagrees with Sheehan.
"I don't believe in some of the things happening here," Qualls said. "I find it disrespectful." {From Yahoo news, before the update about Sheehan's mother}
LCPL Louis Qualls was with my son in Iraq in Al Qaim last winter. Half of the group went to Fallujah in October, including Louis, who was killed in the liberation of Fallujah last November. The outpouring of support for the Qualls family was impressive. Marines are a tight group. My wife got a call saying someone had been killed, and the caller knew it wasn't our son, or hers (twins) or several others... Later we got a call identifying the Marine. My wife posted his name and KIA information at the Navy memorial website, among other things....
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/18/2005 18:12 Comments ||
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Mr. Foot Massager
Is returning the favor of pulling her leg.
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/18/2005 19:13 Comments ||
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looks like an ......(ugh) ....orgasm
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/18/2005 19:53 Comments ||
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...taking her moment in the sun far too seriously...
Perhaps that should have read, "...standing in the sun far too long..."
Armavirumque: commentary
"At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades." I don't understand why these wealthy liberals don't simply give their money to existing think tanks. The authory of the article makes a similar point below.
Mr. Stein must be a very persuasive fellow to have convinced all these donors to ante up $1 million apiece for this initiative. It would be a most difficult task to emulate this achievement on the conservative side. Still, one has a sense that he has pulled a fast one on these wealthy liberals. He claims that conservative groups outspend progressive groups by some $295 million per year to just $75 million, a disparity that is not even remotely close to the real facts of the situation. For example, in a recent year the following liberal and progressive groups spent the following sums:
· The American Civil Liberties Union, $60 million;
· The Urban Institute, $80 million;
· the Natural Resources Defense Council, $55 million;
· World Wildlife Fund, $118 million;
· the NAACP, $40 million.
And this listing only scratches the surface, as it does not include such groups as the Urban League, the Sierra Club, National Organization for Women, National Abortion Rights Action League, Alliance for Justice, the Environmental Defense Fund, La Raza, and others too numerous to mention or even to count. Nor does it include the various university programs designed to propagandize in favor of the progressive agenda. By any reasonable measure, progressive groups outspend conservative groups on an annual basis by a factor of at least 10 to 1.
Awright. That does it. I'm officially announcing the formation of the Rantburg Foundation, and I'm officially designating it as a think tank. Email me for the address to send your multi-million dollar donation.
I promise to put it to good use. (Lessee, here... A million bucks, that works out to roughly 100,000 cases of beer...)
#2
This is great news! My stock in Rent-a-Brain™ is going to go through the roof!
Posted by: Dar ||
08/18/2005 11:13 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Maybe some of the smarter ones have figured they need to set up something like community colleges for democrat leaders to study the things they are terrible at, like history, economics, tax accounting, petroleum economics, agribusiness, foreign policy, military science, statistics, general science, environmental studies, chemistry, physics, and political science. In that order, and taught by republicans.
#4
Anon - No matter what you teach them and how much money and time is spent in the effort, the fact remains that you cannot give them the common sense and credibility they lack.
#5
If there are any liberal millionaires that need someone to analyze and report what they are doing wrong I will do so at half that price. I will also throw in a pony and a pamphlet âWelcome to the dark side: a guide to recovering liberals.â
#6
*sniff* Just think how many poor gay black homeless children you could be feeding with this money instead of spending it on an elitist institution. Don't you have any feelings?
#7
These people should save their money. The Left already has an enormous network of think tanks; they're called "universities," and thousands of American parents pay to keep them in business. (Feeling kind of grumpy about this -- stepson goes off to college next week to have his skull emptied by his nihilistic professors. Bah.)
Posted by: Jonathan ||
08/18/2005 13:48 Comments ||
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#8
Does Mr. Stein get a finders fee from Democracy Alliance for reeling in these fish acquiring these donations?
How about suing the university if you are not getting what you paid for? (ie you spent your stepson to be teached engineering or law not to be indoctrinated on your money
#18
Who is saving the baby ducks (approx. .50 cents per duck)?
Posted by: Captain America ||
08/18/2005 18:40 Comments ||
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#19
Hey BH,
"..poor gay black homeless children.."
What about the poor, gay, illegal alien, HIV+, black, drug addicted adult prisoners on death row who need kidney, heart, and liver transplants. American taxpayers are too greedy and selfish to step up to the plate.
Summer is the season for World War II anniversary celebrations: May 8, Victory in Europe Day; June 6, D-Day; Aug. 15, Victory in Japan Day. But one WWII anniversary day is rarely celebrated: Sept. 29.
This year, Sept. 29 will be the 67th anniversary of the signing of the Munich Agreement by (in order as their signatures appear on the document): Adolph Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini.
Today's politicians please take note: History tends to remember harshly those statesmen who sell out their and other nations â even if it is done under cover of impeccable diplomatic language and with the best of intentions to assure the peace.
The Munich Agreement called for the "cession to Germany of the Sudetan German [sic] Territory [of Czechoslovakia]." Paragraphs 3 and 5 of the Agreement established an "international commission" composed of Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia to work out the final details, oversee the various plebiscites and guarantee the resultant borders.
But on that same day, Sept. 29, Germany's insincerity was already manifest. On that day the four signatories issued an "Annex to the Agreement" in which Germany and Italy withdrew their support for the international commission's work (which they had agreed to earlier in the day when they signed the main agreement) â pending resolution of "the question of the Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia."
Needless to say the "international commission" did nothing the following March 15, 1939, when Germany swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia. Only then, when it was too late, did Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain â who had been proud of his efforts to appease Hitler â finally realize the plight Britain and the world were in.
But a week after the Munich agreement â Oct. 5, 1938 â Chamberlain, on the floor of the House of Commons, had been much more up beat â even exuberant: "The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles. The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous. Now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity."
If one substitutes the name Iraq for Czechoslovakia, above, the resultant language probably would closely approximate what President Bush's Iraq war opponents would be saying the week after a "successful" Iraq exit strategy had been completed â especially the phrase "further progress along the road to sanity." Can't you just hear Sen. Boxer making such a statement?
But "stopping the killing" doesn't always stop the killing, while surrendering to violence rarely leads to "sanity." Sept. 29, 1938's "progress along the road to sanity" ultimately cost the world the death of 60 million souls before it reached VJ Day on Aug. 15, 1945.
Consider the words of a far wiser statesman than the misguided Neville Chamberlain. Last week, in the Washington Post, Dr. Henry Kissinger assessed the likely outcome if we use an exit strategy out of Iraq before we succeed in our mission:
"The war in Iraq is less about geopolitics than about the clash of ideologies, culture and religious beliefs. Because of the long reach of the Islamist challenge, the outcome in Iraq will have an even deeper significance than that in Vietnam. If a Taliban-type government or a fundamentalist radical state were to emerge in Baghdad or any part of Iraq, shock waves would ripple through the Islamic world. Radical forces in Islamic countries or Islamic minorities in non-Islamic countries would be emboldened in their attacks on existing governments. The safety and internal stability of all societies within reach of militant Islam would be imperiled."
Those people today calling for a quick exit from Iraq after the shortest possible decent interval apparently can't imagine anything worse than the sad loss of American troops at the current level in Iraq. Just "stop the killing" and "return to sanity." I don't accuse such people of being foolish â merely lacking in imagination and foresight. Neville Chamberlain was no fool â he was just wrong.
Confronting Hitler in 1938 over Czechoslovakia was dangerous. If Hitler didn't back down, British troops would die in the following confrontation. Chamberlain was a man of peace, and he kept the peace for another 11 months.
The road to the bloody hell of World War II was paved with Neville Chamberlain's very good intentions to keep the peace.
If the Iraq exit strategy crowd wins the day (and if, as I believe, Henry Kissinger's vision is a prescient one), 60 years from now no one will be celebrating "Exit Strategy Day." But its advocates will certainly share poor old Neville's dingy place in historic memory.
Now that a new climate initiative has been signed by the US and five Asian and Pacific countries, the European Union finds itself increasingly isolated.
The Bush administration has been able to put together a coalition of countries that account for half of global greenhouse gas emissions today, a figure that is likely to increase significantly in the coming decades as emerging economies such as China and India (both members of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate) experience dramatic economic growth. The remaining signatories -- Japan, Australia, and South Korea -- have already achieved higher energy efficiency, yet they can contribute substantially to technology transfer as well as reduce future emissions. Among the members of the Partnership, only Japan has legal obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.
Generally speaking, the Kyoto Protocol gives to developing nations great opportunities for rent-seeking. That is the case, for example, of former Soviet Republics, which are going to make a lot of money in the next few years by selling hot air -- that is, emissions credits that they would not use otherwise -- to European countries unable to meet their Kyoto targets. Yet, that is just a trade in hot air: the process will result in little or no actual reduction of GHG emissions.
Moreover, the Asia-Pacific Partnership's goals follow closely the action plan issued by G8 leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland, less than one month ago. The plan -- signed by representatives of the eight most industrialized countries, including France, Italy, Germany, and the UK -- focuses on energy innovation and research & development of cleaner technologies, as well as technological transfer to the developing world in order to address global warming. The underlying concept is that climate change is a long-term, global threat (assuming it is a threat at all), thus it must find a long-term, global response, as opposed to short-term GHG reductions in a selected number of developed countries.
One would expect those sincerely concerned about the anthropogenic greenhouse effect to welcome the news of the new Partnership, at the very least because it provides a framework to work together with the biggest emitters who are not included or have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Unfortunately the reaction was cold.
"[The Asia-Pacific pact] is no substitute for agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and we do not expect it to have a real impact on climate change," said the European Commission's environment spokeswoman Barbara Helferrich. "We have serious concerns that the apparent lack of targets in this deal means that there is no sense of what it is ultimately trying to achieve or the urgency of taking action to combat climate change," said Royal Society president Lord May. "And the developed countries involved with this agreement must not be tempted to use it as an excuse to avoid tackling their own emissions."
German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin criticized the Partnership and claimed it is "no working alternative to the binding guidelines of the Kyoto protocol." Needless to say, major environmental groups dismissed the initiative as a way to ultimately undermine Kyoto.
Why so many attacks on the US-led initiative? First for a reason of political pride: it is a US-led initiative, after all. European countries have been playing green politics for years, and now they can't admit Washington has succeeded in creating what might turn out to be the only viable, truly global effort to address global warming. Similarly radical environmentalists have deemed President Bush as Environmental Enemy No. 1: how can they admit without losing face that he's gone beyond Kyoto and he's doing more than the EU champions?
Then there's an ideological reason. Many members of the environmental club, as well as European political elites, see climate policies as mere means to achieve political control over society. It is no surprise then that they tend to prefer command & control over voluntary agreements, and legally binding mandates over innovation -- which by definition can't be centrally planned.
Finally there is an economic reason. Under a Kyoto-style treaty bureaucracy enjoys the power to pick winners and losers between countries, industries, and individual firms. When you get to a voluntary, science-based, R&D-oriented program that very power is much smaller or even zero -- and the winning countries, industries, and firms lose their ability to seek favors.
The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate has already achieved one important goal: it has exposed what the Kyoto crowd really wants.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
