Frank Rich on the bashing of Cindy Sheehan (nsr)

[natty dread]

August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil
that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that
fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to
an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack
Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the
president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14
marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in
Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of
Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he
wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who
hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against
an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.

When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts.
But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan
could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character
assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by
his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a
critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is
especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a
president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who
had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents
with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry.
But the list of past targets stretches from the former
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the
grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately
armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower
Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as
"courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to
save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its
perpetrators to jail.

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News,
where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The
right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry
Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary
sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying
attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to
declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged
documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is
yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of
political support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest
priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's
character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11
inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an
insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's
abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that
persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on
Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the
administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's
nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy
Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups
that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we
would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has
taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr.
Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly
synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless
carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a
gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her
ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by
actually meeting with her.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's
story, not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers,
you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to
go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just
the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the
hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching
orders.

Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle
Scout: a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve
his country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with
six other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004,
at the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had
been mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq.
This was almost a year after the president had declared the end of
"major combat operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The Times,
the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort were
militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric.
The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns reported,
members of "the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force"
abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations "almost as
soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the
militiamen in unchallenged control."

Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld typically
went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these Iraqi
security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there were
"over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped" and that
they were "out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence."
We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the
other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by
subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination
thereof.

As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, a
declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops
and police officers at 171,500, with only "a small number" able to
fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr,
he remains as much a player as ever in the new "democratic" Iraq. He
controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His
loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently
vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist
who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated
Basra's politics and police force.

Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the
war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another
mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last
Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker,
was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing
security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking
for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't
exist."

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks
after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents'
Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine
featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval
Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the
fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala
wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries
Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the
national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16
errant words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State
of the Union speech.)

Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some
aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for
keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and
spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately
manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans'
sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the
start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of
"deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air
bases. It's why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has
not attended funeral services for the military dead. It's why
January's presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to
the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq
was banished from the Inaugural Address.

THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once
too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the
dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too
far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice
has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the
war's critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's
grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep
on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the
photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any
more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in
Iraq.

[shamrockpow]

I know it's summer, but if I want to read the NYTimes, they do have a website. No need to post something every week...

[skieast]

good read, but i'm just a left wing commie canadian.

[weibo]

I don't get the NY Times so thanks for the article I will hunt down more to read myself. I don't want to see only one side you know.

[CUBUCK]

I don't get the NY Times so thanks for the article I will hunt down more to read myself. I don't want to see only one side you know.

you're right can someone start posting from the post so we can get some balance in here

[KillingCokes]

Shut Up and Think What You're Told
A message from the Department of Homeland Insecurity

[bklyn]

My heart would be so broken, losing him/her to this war.
I would not be able to continue with a normal life.
I support our troops, but am against this mess in Iraq.

I would want to talk to the president, and say "where is Bin Ladin? isn't he the bad guy we should be after? why iraq if there really were no wmd?"

I would want to know why he hasn't asked the American people to rally together and sacrifice in support of our goals, like we did in wwii:

[cj001f]

I would want to talk to the president, and say "where is Bin Ladin? isn't he the bad guy we should be after? why iraq if there really were no wmd?"

The emperor's new suit is gorgeous, why can't you see it?

[Nobody Famous]

Cindy Sheehan, in the midst of her loss and her grieving, is being used by anti-war, anti-republican groups, IMO. She's very media savvy, or better to say, someone is advising her how to be so on the national stage.

If there's any doubt, read the two very different newspaper accounts of her meeting with W, one right after-the-fact, and a modified version several months later. See the links in the fifth paragraph in this Slate article.

[natty dread]

I know it's summer, but if I want to read the NYTimes, they do have a website. No need to post something every week...

No need to click on a post I clearly titled and marked nsr dude.

[skibe]

No need to click on a post I clearly titled and marked nsr dude.

Your NSR threads are getting a little boring,dude!

[natty dread]

To each their own skibe. If you find the situation with Iraq over there and at home boring, then don't read these nsr posts and keep your head in the sand like shrub.

[KillingCokes]

Your NSR threads are getting a little boring,dude!

One more instance of the apapthy that those in control love. In order to lead you have to show up. You think it's cool to be controlled by others. Not lending your voice allows others to make the decisions that control your life.

[zion zig zag]

I think it's part of being a responsible citizen to follow what the president is doing.

An important fact to remember, and there's nothing wrong with natty making the info easily accessible. I don't think he's surprising anyone with his nsr posts.

[Ski Monkey]

I know it's summer, but if I want to read the NYTimes, they do have a website. No need to post something every week...

On the contrary, I welcome natty's posts. Thanks natty.

[glademaster]

Thirded. After a weekend in a house without Internet, TV, or much radio news(other than NPR). Its nice to check in and see current events being discussed. Sure, its a ski message board, but it is August. Thanks Natty.

[Blurred]

I don't think he's surprising anyone with his nsr posts.

Yeah, years of Nattys cut n' paste jobs, I don't think anyones surprised.

[extreeski]

the point is that gw is a complete asshole coward.

and here's something skiing related.... when gas goes to 3.50 a gallon you better be carpoolin' to the mountain.

[InspectorGadget]

One more instance of the apapthy ...

NIMBY!

Not in my backyard!

Whether at the local or national level, people don't give a damn until it's their backyard that's on fire. Pure and simple, it is apathy on our part that allows those with a personal agenda to further their cause. Until more people are willing to pull their heads from their ass or the sand - as the case may be - nothing will change.

Baa baa! All you nice little sheep.


While it's not a bad first move, taking a stand and getting involved takes more than cutting and pasting - keep it up Natty.



[/minor political rant]

[natty dread]

GOP Senator Says Iraq Looking Like Vietnam
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
4 hours ago

WASHINGTON - A leading Republican senator and prospective presidential candidate said Sunday that the war in Iraq has destabilized the Middle East and is looking more like the Vietnam conflict from a generation ago.

Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who received two Purple Hearts and other military honors for his service in Vietnam, reiterated his position that the United States needs to develop a strategy to leave Iraq. Hagel scoffed at the idea that U.S. troops could be in Iraq four years from now at levels above 100,000, a contingency for which the Pentagon is preparing.

"We should start figuring out how we get out of there," Hagel said on "This Week" on ABC. "But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur."

Hagel said "stay the course" is not a policy. "By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq ... we're not winning," he said.

President Bush was preparing for separate speeches this week to reaffirm his plan to help Iraq train its security forces while its leaders build a democratic government. In his weekly Saturday radio address, Bush said the fighting there protected Americans at home.

Polls show the public growing more skeptical about Bush's handling of the war.

In Iraq, officials continued to craft a new constitution in the face of a Monday night deadline for parliamentary approval. They missed the initial deadline last week.

Other Republican senators appearing on Sunday news shows advocated remaining in Iraq until the mission set by Bush is completed, but they also noted that the public is becoming more and more concerned and needs to be reassured.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., another possible candidate for president in 2008, disagreed that the U.S. is losing in Iraq. He said a constitution guaranteeing basic freedoms would provide a rallying point for Iraqis.

"I think this is a very crucial time for the future of Iraq," said Allen, also on ABC. "The terrorists don't have anything to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. All they care to do is disrupt."

Hagel, who was among those who advocated sending two to three times as many troops to Iraq when the war began in March 2003, said a stronger military presence by the U.S. is not the solution today.

"We're past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," Hagel said. "The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Allen said that unlike the communist-guided North Vietnamese who fought the U.S., the insurgents in Iraq have no guiding political philosophy or organization. Still, Hagel argued, the similarities are growing.

"What I think the White House does not yet understand _ and some of my colleagues _ the dam has broke on this policy," Hagel said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities (to Vietnam) are going to come together."

The Army's top general, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that the Army is planning for the possibility of keeping the current number of soldiers in Iraq _ well over 100,000 _ for four more years as part of preparations for a worst-case scenario.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said U.S. security is tied to success in Iraq, and he counseled people to be patient.

"The worst-case scenario is not staying four years. The worst-case scenario is leaving a dysfunctional, repressive government behind that becomes part of the problem in the war on terror and not the solution," Graham said on "Fox News Sunday.

Allen said the military would be strained at such levels in four years yet could handle that difficult assignment. Hagel described the Army contingency plan as "complete folly."

"I don't know where he's going to get these troops," Hagel said. "There won't be any National Guard left ... no Army Reserve left ... there is no way America is going to have 100,000 troops in Iraq, nor should it, in four years."

Hagel added: "It would bog us down, it would further destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more influence, it would hurt Israel, it would put our allies over there in Saudi Arabia and Jordan in a terrible position. It won't be four years. We need to be out."

[13]

I'd love to know how many of Cindy Sheehan's bashers have children of their own.

[mr_gyptian]

I love how you feel compelled to cut and paste articles/op-eds from the most widely read newspaper in the world. at any rate Cindy Sheehan has every right to protest any war she pleases. Moveon and the demo underground are making a fine puppet out of her. it's great that she is giving a face to the anti-war movement. the last time the anti-war movement was so strong Richard Nixon won two elections in a row.

maybe it's her message that is winning over so many people. This is an excerpt from a speech she gave protesting Lynne Stewart's conviction:

I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I'm going all over the country telling moms: "This country is not worth dying for." If we're attacked, we would all go out. We'd all take whatever we had. I'd take my rolling pin and I'd beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant. . . .

What they're saying, too, is like, it's okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. It's okay for the United States to have nuclear weapons. It's okay for the countries that we say it's okay for. We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now. It's okay for them to have them, but Iran or Syria can't have them. It's okay for Israel to occupy Palestine, but it's--yeah--and it's okay for Iraq to occupy--I mean, for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it's not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon.

[Tippster]

Chuck Hagel will be the GOP's nominee for the Presidency in 2008.

[mr_gyptian]

Chuck Hagel will be the GOP's nominee for the Presidency in 2008.

or join Trent Lott in history's dust bin.

[Nobody Famous]

Cindy Sheehan is on the record as saying GWB and his think-tank friends (''band of neocons") deliberately allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to happen. She explains this by saying GWB & friends allowed it happen to push their neo-conservative agenda through.

I feel for her. But the above thought is pretty far out there.