Posted on 08/15/2005 10:34:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A good illustration of the collusion between axe-grinding victims and the cynical media that exploit them appeared after one of last year's presidential debates: a placard was crassly put up in "spin alley" to direct reporters to "9-11 widows" who were eager to provide them with quotes disparaging George Bush for not making the right noises during the debate.
Cindy Sheehan and the media's manipulative use of her brings this episode back to mind. We're witnessing a replay of the media's cynical catering to the 9-11 widows, dubbed the "Jersey Girls," which began with great interest but then trailed off in proportion to the media's embarrassment about their wildly imprecise and boring charges. The media, thrilled to have something to work with during the dog days of August, will soon lose interest in Sheehan too.
Owing in large part to the microscopic powers of the Internet and talk radio, the mainstream media now realize that they can only get away with using axe-grinding victims to advance their agenda for so long. As news of the victims' dangerously ill-conceived views becomes well-known through the alternative media, mainstream reporters, if only out of self-consciousness, stop using these victims as proxies for their biases.
The media know that grief doesn't confer upon a person instant lucidity and authority, though they act as if it does, provided the grief inspires a political position they favor. Had Sarah Brady, say, responded to her husband's death by joining the staff of the NRA, the media wouldn't have paid the slightest bit of attention to her except maybe for purposes of mockery. Obviously the media aren't interested in assuaging Sheehan's grief -- were a bigger story to break they would desert her in a second, as they even did to their persecuted colleague Judith Miller after Bush announced John Roberts as his Supreme Court nominee.
What the media are interested in is Sheehan's politics, and the window of that interest will close for good once the public learns of her ambitiously radical views -- that Bush should be impeached as a war criminal, that America is an abomination not worth defending against terrorists, and so forth. In the end, the media will probably have added to her grief once they take away from her the new life of celebrity activism they have encouraged her to pursue in the absence of the life of her son.
Sheehan doesn't speak for war widows and grieving moms any more than the Jersey Girls spoke for all relatives of 9-11 victims. And like them, Sheehan hasn't crafted her case very carefully or modestly. Just as the Jersey Girls acted as though their grief somehow made them experts on rearranging the CIA and entitled them to harangue Condi Rice, so Sheehan is making outrageous demands upon the military's commander in chief -- demands only possible in a democracy in which a fatuous media can get its leaders, who are supposed to be thinking about the common good, entangled in all sorts of absurd and superficial controversies.
What the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz said about the 9/11 windows is worth recalling in light of the Sheehan spectacle. One of them, Kristen Breitwester, had submitted an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal. Rabinowitz advised against running it, saying that it was "total and complete nonsense -- not to mention repetitive nonsense -- nonsense from people given endless media access to repeat the very same stupid charges, suspicions, and the rest....this is just an opportunity for these absurd products of the zeitgeist -- women clearly in the grip of the delusion that they know something, have some policy, and wisdom not given to the rest of us to know -- to grab the spotlight."
Ultimately, the media tuned them out, especially, as liberals complained, after they endorsed John Kerry and their overt liberal partisanship made it impossible for the media to treat them as sainted experts.
Sheehan is one of these absurd products of the zeitgeist that Rabinowitz describes -- a zeitgeist that gravitates to grief for commercial and ideological, not human, reasons. Sheehan, too, may find herself, as Breitwester did, standing forlornly beneath a placard announcing her grief and loss, hoping that some reporter will stop and give her the jolt of celebrity that substitutes in a twisted culture for the comfort of real compassion.
That's the final word on this story as far as I'm concerned. This is a sideshow.
George Neumayr Ping
Neumayr nails it again.
Just as leftists here and worldwide loved us on 9/11.
Loved us only when we are dying.
As soon as we fight back, they hate again.
Sarah Brady's husband Jim is still alive
Both she and Wilson said they expected they would get arrested Thursday. Cindy said, "I think we need as many people here on Thursday anyway, because Rice and Rumsfeld will be here....I'd rather not get arrested, but I'm willing to, I'm willing to have them pick me up and carry me away."
(Link intentionally not provided)
good 1! :D
Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty!
I really wish you had the time to be corrected, but I think you'll be gone soon for your juvenile language.
POOF!
True, but after suffering significant brain damage, he was turned from a Republican into a dimocRAT. I suppose that's understandable.
I said this on another post and I'll reinforce the good scholarship exhibited in this post. Her is my take:
It is an easy thing to turn this narcissist Sheehan into a mule for the left complete with paypal accounts set up by moveon for donations to Peace House.
It is a formula developed during the Viet Nam War to use the grief of the parents to flip them against the government. This tactic was used in the movie, "Friendly Fire", aired as a TV movie in 1979--too late to affect the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. However, the book, "Friendly Fire" by C.D.B. Bryan was published in 1976 began the process of discrediting those 58,219 heroes who died in Vietnam and the 153,356 heroes wounded. It embodies the psychological template to be used in future military actions by the left against our government.
We also saw this tactic being used with the families of the 9/11. You should remember the noisy moms called the Jersey Girls, and the 9-11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow (funded by John Kerry's wife Teresa).
not only understandable, it's required.
bttt
For the most part, it has done this by first creating and then exploiting a hypersensitivity to casualties which are inevitably incurred in any conflict. It cultivates this hypersensitivity by personifying the casualties and their relatives. Most of us quite rightly shrink from exploiting the bloody images of those who have died or were maimed on our behalf but, ever since Lennin, the left has learned that the ends justify the means. The ends sought by the press and the whole of the left is to deprive our democracy of the power to wage war, and even realistically to threaten to wage war as an instrument of foreign policy- at least in so far as the left might not agree with that war.
The implications of this development could not be more ominous, for, if the press and Mrs. Sheehan succeed in their end run around the American Constitution, they might also succeed in indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans-or Iranians-or North Koreans.
If the left and the press succeed in their quest, then, inevitably, the United States will have no credibility if it threatens war against rogue states who would develop atomic weapons and thereafter sell them or otherwise pass them along to crazed Islamic terrorists. Tens of thousands of American lives could go forefit. Or a staunch President such as George Bush, unable to intimidate such nations because the left has undermined his credibility, must make resort to strikes heavy enough to destroy such weapons, perhaps at the cost of many Iranian or North Korean lives.
Today we are in a place where the left has succeeded in killing off the Bush doctrine. If not dead, it is at least comatose and will only be revived by another massive strike on the homeland. The blood of these dead Americans will be on the hands of Mrs. Sheehan and those bloodstained (in this case, not ink-stained) wretches of the fourth estate.
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