Posted by Andy
Just got around to reading your Aug. 15 post…can’t say I share your generosity toward Cindy Sheehan. Her demand to meet with Bush a second time was not only presumptuous grandstanding but transparently phony. Nothing he could say to her about the war that he hasn’t already said over and over, or, given her prejudices, anything that might ease her personal loss. However genuine her feelings about the war, I find it disgusting that she used her dead son to take off on what boils down to a self-dramatizing ego trip. I felt the same way about the Trade Center widows, with their self-important pronouncements and inane recommendations to the 9/11 Commission, as though bereavement confers some special right to (ax-grinding) pontification. Closure, shmosure. But I guess a lot of people relish their 15 minutes of fame, particularly if they can cloak it in self-righteousness.
I too have several friends who feel the same way about Bush and the war, notably including my wife, and of course they have an unquestioned right to protest. They might even be right, although they don’t present any realistic options. Now that Bush has got us there, for better or for worse, we can hardly just get out and let Iraq dissolve into civil war, with God knows what consequences down the line. Of course that might happen anyway, but I don’t see any reasonable alternative, at this juncture, to the broad outlines of present U.S. policy.
I don’t quite agree with you about the MSM. However inauthentic and bubble-headed Cindy may be, her theatrics and the war protests in general are certainly a legitimate story, worth the heavy coverage. Nor do I think the aim is necessarily to damage Bush. Cindy’s own statements pretty much speak for themselves–don’t really require much analysis or rebuttal. And the MSM haven’t been entirely uncritical. I didn’t see the program, but I understand, for instance, that Anderson Cooper on CNN confronted her with some of her quotes and pressed her rather adversarially to defend them, if she could.
I also don’t agree that Iraq, or even the over-all “War on Terror,” is at this point a war for our very survival. Bush’s dictum about the defense of freedom requiring the advance of freedom is lovely rhetoric but not really true. Freedom has survived quite nicely in the U.S. for a couple of centuries, in a world that has never been conspicuously lit by the torch of liberty, and I see no reason to believe that present circumstances have changed the equation. Anyway, we sure as hell have a tiger by the tail in Baghdad.