a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, August 22, 2005 Harmonic ConvergenceHere is a lead to an anti-grieving mom rant.And now, here's another: Cindy Sheehan's son Casey died in Sadr City last year, and that fact is supposed to put her beyond reproach. For as the New York Times' Maureen Dowd informed us: ''The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."... by Mark Steyn. Think it's possible Hitchens and Steyn got the same memo on Cindy Sheehan? Hmmm. In any case, Steyn goes on in this vein: Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton's Oval Office, she's a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he's a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know what he's doing.I'm sorry, but everyone refers to soldiers as "kids." Our kids in uniform is just wartime jargon, and Steyn thinks he can make silly-liberal hay out of a trope Republicans know damn well how to exploit when they need to. That shit won't fly here at Radio Free Mike. Steyn goes on to compare the collapse of Sheehan's marriage to a rift within the Democratic party, then seems to notice his lapse in taste, backpedals, and lurches into something worse: Sorry about that, but, if Mrs. Sheehan can insist her son's corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don't see why her marriage can't be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.Right. Cindy Sheehan's vigils may become a determining factor in American policy on Iraq -- disastrously -- and so men like Hitchens and Steyn have to make idiots of themselves blaming her for the shift, as if she had it planned this way all along, as if you couldn't have predicted a peace movement swelling around a grieving widow back when the "weapons of mass destruction" thing fell apart in 2003. It absolutely doesn't matter if Cindy Sheehan's "take on Iraq" is right or wrong. Rational debate isn't what got us into this war in the first place, and what the pundits are helplessly watching in Crawford is a natural human answer to Bush's insulting leadership, which has treated the whole nation like kids. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:48 PM | |
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