Posted on 08/17/2005 5:55:48 AM PDT by KevinNuPac
Did The Anti-War Movement Martyr a Grieving Mother? By Kevin Fobbs
When Cindy Sheehan first camped down on August 6th in the president's hometown of Crawford, Texas, she was a barely noticed footnote on the daily news. Here was a grieving mother who had lost her son in the Iraqi War. Most of the nation who heard about her came to feel a sense of lost themselves, because the media was showing this tortured mother's soft voice, cracking at times as she presented her seemingly innocent case to America, with her target squarely set on the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
She told us that she simply wanted to share her feelings with the president. She had lost her son, and she just wanted a simple meeting with the president. The media managers in the background did not want her to be combative, did not want her to engage in open heckling...because that would drive her negatives way, way down and after all this was the president's summer home and some decorum would have to be followed.
What this innocent request of a mom tortured by the memory of her son did not show was the incredible media and political operation which was just waiting stage left, formulating, generating, manufacturing and tailoring an incredible anti-war hype machine, so well tailored and scripted that many Americans probably just wanted to stand up from their backyard barbeques and simply salute it.
But, just what were they saluting?
After all, this American mother simply wanted to share her honest feelings with the president. She had traveled from her hometown to plead her case to her son's former Commander In Chief. She wanted to sit down with the president and have him explain to her, why he had died and why he had fought in an unjust war, but it seems that she was not really prepared to listen to the president, because her conclusions had already been reached.
Cindy Sheehan, whom some in the anti-war movement have equated to the legendary civil rights warrior, Rosa Parks, has framed a new message for America. Does she represent all the grieving parents of America's Iraqi and Afghanistan war dead? What is she truly attempting to accomplish?
We don't know and she is not saying. We do know that this innocently crafted mystique that surrounded her initial request is not so innocent and also not so mysterious. Her media generated demand to have a sit down with the president was not to be her first but her second meeting with the president. You see, she actually had her first meeting with the president and parents of other soldiers who had also lost loved ones in battle.
This same martyred mother of the new anti-war movement actually had a different story to tell to the American public after her first meeting on June 24th of 2004 with the president. She told reporters that "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."
Her words were not tortured, or labored. They were not forced, they were not, insincere. They were the words of a grieving parent who recognized that the President of the United States had taken time out of his day to share a moment of life and grief and demonstrate that the man who had sent their loved one to war, who had been anguished to see and feel their loss, was with them in their grief that day.
What changed from that moment? Which grieving mother did the president see then and what grieving mother is the nation seeing now? The mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan who had been killed in Iraq journeyed with her husband Patrick and children to join the 17 other families who would meet with the president at Fort. Lewis, outside of Seattle, Washington.
The face-to-face with President Bush was commented on later by the "Rosa Parks" of the new and soon to dissipate anti-war movement, in very warm endearing ways. She said to a reporter, ""I now know [the president is] sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."
Where was this same mother who said on the weekend of August 6th this year, something quite different? She said "He acted like it was a party. He came in very jovial-- like we should be happy that ... our son died for [the president's] misguided policies." Was she acting in good faith the first or second time? Was she acting in good faith when she told the press that she asked the president to make her son's sacrifice count for something?
What about the shared family gift the meeting with the president had given them? Her accounting of the time with the family was a special gift. For that precious moment in time, she and her family put aside their grief and felt complete and whole again. She commented at the time that "For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died." She added, "That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together."
So was it the anti-war movement, was it politics that caused this mother to change, to morph into this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because she forgot to share something that was on her mind then with the president? Did the anti-war and anti-Bush groups that she participated with last year decide to re-cast her into an "innocent" who just happened to show up on President Bush's doorstep this month?
Well what about the national ad campaign that she took part in last year funded by Move On.org? What about the anti-war machine's use of her story to move on against President Bush's re-election efforts?
Was her real pain exploited for a presidential contender? Was it more political than painful for MoveOn.org's political exploitation machine? Was she being politically used when the New York Times wrote that her national ad along with the other political ads were "scary"?
So again, what version of honest anguish is America seeing? MoveOn.org participated in an ad campaign featuring Cindy Sheehan and developed by an organization called "Real Voices. According to their website the organization was engaged in a "Battleground Campaign." They crafted an ad called "A Mother's Tears," with Cindy Sheehan talking about her son, Spc. Casey Sheehan. I could not help but feel anguish for her and outrage for the insincerity of the Real Voices' less than genuine use of her pain.
You see after you watched her mournful pain, you click back to the home page and there at the bottom of the page is the truth to this entire fabrication. You see, while the nation was seeing Cindy Sheehan's painful loss, the anti-war movement media manufacturing machine was mobilizing voters against the president during the presidential election year.
At the bottom of the seemingly impartial organization's webpage is this phrase: "Real Voices is a non-profit organization that spends 100% of its donations on effective political action. We advocate the election of John Kerry."
So there you have it. A real mother's loss and pain hijacked for sinister political purposes is perhaps the cruelest loss of decency for our nation and the hardest most difficult burden for the loved ones of our nation's honored war dead to bear.
-----------
Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is a regular contributing columnist to the Detroit News. He is also Outreach Communications Vice Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit as well as co-founder of the Jackson, MI-based American Conservative Values Television Network. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show online at www.wdtkam.com daily 2-3 p.m., and call in toll-free nationwide to make your opinion count at 800-923-WDTK(9385).
--------------------
You guys are funny!!!
Semi-humorous write-up from the Law Society of New South Wales:
Legal Terminology: Is it spelt 'judgment' or 'judgement'?
Don't forget the IVAW( an offshoot of the VVAW). I just saw Cindy on TV next to a giant IVAW banner. The VVAW/IVAW is the group John Kerry was working with during the Vietnam war. The group is heavily supported by communist sympathiers.
She is a lying fruitbat dancing on the bones and valor of her dead boy who probably joined up just to spite her.
She should be shamed and shunned.
I have to watch myself, here, that I don't write (rite? right? wright?) words the way they sound.
Posting on Free Republic is sort of like entering into a "spoken" conversation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.