I started my vacation the same day as the president, but now I'm back at work and the president is still away. I see that leaving the White House vacant no longer insulates him from controversy.
I've been following the showdown in Crawford with great interest to see how the right wing manages to rally itself behind a smear of a Gold Star mom. So far I've been pleased to see the efforts have been remarkably weak. I would have expected the Rovian tactic of turning your opponent's strongest asset -- in this case the fact that Cindy Sheehan's son died fighting in Iraq -- against her. Perhaps they could make a circumstantial case that she was a bad mom. Did she leave Casey with a sitter so she could have a night out at times? Who knows.
While they have stopped just shy of attacking motherhood itself as unpatriotic, some on the rabid right have been willing to smear her for being a mother who cares too much. They accuse her of not honoring her son's memory or of being "borderline treasonous." The Editors (via Pharyngula) readily demolish this line of attack:
The upshot of the post appears to be that there is nothing necessarily wrong with being the mother of a dead soldier, provided you don’t let it influence your opinions in any way, and provided that you don’t feel that you are somehow entitled to an explanation of why, exactly, he was sent off to die. Failing this, you deserve whatever you get, and anybody who calls you a whore is protected by a Level 50 No-Backsies Force Field.
There are a number of other anti-Sheehan meme strains that are cross-breeding in the wingnut sewers, and who knows which of these might mutate into something hardy enough to infect cocktail party chat. All of these are based in the "for us or against us," black & white, good vs. evil, false dichotomies of conservative epistemology. They may best be countered not in the domain of facts and logic, but with heart and compassion.
1) She flip-flopped. Bill O'Reilly was pushing this line particularly hard, arguing that she was satisfied with her first meeting with Bush but later changed her mind and wanted another audience. To the Manichean mind this means either her initial position was a sham -- a terrible weakness of character -- or her current position is a lie -- a shadow of some sinister hidden motive. It turns out of course her quotes were taken out of context and her position has been remarkably invariant even through the throes of grief.
But that's a hard argument to make because it's shaded and nuanced. Like verbal aikido it may be easier to take the momentum of this attack and turn it on the attacker. Maybe Cindy Sheehan changed her mind and maybe she didn't, but so what? Many Americans who were initially supportive of the war have changed their minds, and have done so partly because of the mounting evidence that Bush lied us into it. It's a not a moral weakness to say you were wrong, especially not when you realized you have been duped. Rather than focusing on defending Sheehan's consistency, we need to laud and encourage more mom's like this one:
"I wasn't against the war when Kelley got killed. And it didn't change my mind for six months after his death," said Prewitt in a thick Alabama drawl. "But my mind changed with proof of the war's lies," she said.
2) Her family doesn't share her views. This letter from "The Sheehan Family" urging Cindy to stop her vigil is the right wing's evidence that she is unhinged and off the rails, acting in some way against the will of her entire family. This is of course false as the whole Sheehan nuclear family, those who knew Casey best, is fully supportive. The letter itself is highly suspect, being sent by email and signed anonymously by "Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins."
But even if this really is the view of some members of her extended family -- so what? In the national environment of polarizing issues and divisive rhetoric, who doesn't have some members of their family that they disagree with? My step-father is a staunch Republican and our arguments have become more and more heated over the last five years to the point where my mom has informally forbidden political discussions at family gatherings. This war is tearing families apart, not only by robbing them of their sons and daughters, but breaking them into warring camps across an ideological divide. This is another tragedy we can all identify with and which must be laid at Bush's "uniting not dividing" feet.
3) She's a dupe and/or member of the radical left. The right has been relentless in trying to tar Sheehan by association with the prominent liberals who support her actions. This can be particularly effective for middle of the road people who might be sympathetic to Sheehan but withhold support so they don't inadvertently support the hated Micheal Moore or his cohorts, or even worse accidentally become liberals themselves by this association. Of course this is absurd -- she's not a tool, and guilt by association is a fallacy -- but it's a base emotional appeal and tough to counter. It doesn't help that the different interest groups and factions of liberalism don't get along well with each other, and I'm sure there are many Democrats who wish Micheal Moore would go away or at least not stand so close.
I think the correct approach here is one that Cindy Sheehan herself has charted. Rather than staking out a specific position in the liberal or anti-war spectrum, she instead has only a question. She wants the president to explain the noble cause that justifies her son's death. This transcends factual or emotional arguments to cut to the core ethos underlying them all, and unites us all in the inquiry. If this question can be asked enough, and the various answers examined, we may at last perhaps realize that there is no answer. Only then can we as a nation truly morn and move on.
- jack*
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