Bush vs. the Mother

Rolling Stone ^ | 8/25/05 | Matt Taibbi

[LarryDeRobio]

The ostensible political purpose may be ending the war, but the immediate occupation for a sizable percentage of these people always seemed to be a kind of rolling adult tourist attraction called Hating George Bush. Marches become Hate Bush Cruises; vigils, Hate Bush Resorts...At one point at Camp Casey, an informal poll taken around a campfire revealed that six out of a group of ten protesters, selected at random, believed that the United States government was directly involved in planning the 9/11 bombings. Flabbergasted, I tried to press the issue.

"Do you know how many people would have to be involved in that conspiracy?" I said. "I mean, start with the pilots . . ."

[LarryDeRobio]

Thought this piece was pretty groovey (hey i'm down with this whole 60s vibe with Joan Baez and all). The dude is a lefty, but is still lucid enough to be bothered enough by the freakshow and the freaks to write about them.

[LarryDeRobio]

Apologies for the double post had a little computer fart there.

[MJY1288]

"Thought this piece was pretty groovey"

LOL, I guess so, you posted it three times :-)

[LarryDeRobio]

AH!!! I'm so sorry the page expired on me didn't know it went through!!

[pipecorp]

As with any wrtiting , the first few paras is to get you lulled in, so when he starts attacking the "lizards" you don't notice. by the way cindy is not the sweet naive mommy he tries to make her out to be, his ultimate objective, negating the first 3/4 of the story.

[MarkeyD]

He tried to make it sound reasonable. But then he finished it with:

Iraq isn't like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don't watch the fighting, we don't see the bodies come home and we don't hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.

The only movement we're going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn't bring us folk songs, but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.

[Cecily]

He's also not very objective about Axis Cindy. She's earned every bit of the scorn he criticizes.

[LarryDeRobio]

You're right. But along the way he confirms so much of what we know about the anti-war movement.

[LarryDeRobio]

No doubt he held back on her, but he shed some light on the contrived cult of personality thing going on down there.

[MJY1288]

No Problem, it happens to all of us from time to time, Just havin fun with ya pal,

Cheers and thanks posting the article

Mike

[socialismisinsidious]

exactly...everyone should read the entire article.

[CaptRon]

On my first night at the camp, a protester parked too close to a gully, and her car slipped into a ditch. While a bunch of us tried to extricate it, pushing the car as its wheels spun, one protester leaned over to another.

Why didn't Cindy just wander over, raise her arms, and levitiate the thing out (a Volvo no doubt).

[LarryDeRobio]

I know it man. But in his honest moments he confirms so much of what we know.

[ChildOfThe60s]

We don't watch the fighting, we don't see the bodies come home and we don't hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.

Funny, we have seen a lot more of that than CNN showed us of Saddam's torture chambers, rape victims, mass graves, wood chippers, gassed kurds and leveled villages.

Wonder how that happened, huh Rolling Stoned?

[LarryDeRobio]

Thanks man. Maybe it's a Sheehan virus.

[Cyclopean Squid]

Well, this guy's anti-war stance is at least semi-cogent, unlike much of Sheehan's rants. Sheehan is a liability to the Left and the, well, (for want of a better word) legitimate peace movement. They'll silence her if only because she's so ineffectual. Rolling Stone in this sense has become like the Brain after Snowball succeeded in usurping control of the globe--he told Pinky that for once they needed to save the world, if only to have a shot at taking it over the next night.

And surely the peaceniks realize by now that true anti-war sentiment, a la Vietnam, will never materialize unless and until there is a draft (an extreme unprobability)? That's all it was ever about before. There may be a few true idealists, and a couple of fervent Blame-America-Firsters, and a handful of ardent seditionists and traitors, but active opposition to the war is not an issue for most until it directly affects them.

[LarryDeRobio]

We also don't see anything about our battlefield successes. We only see when our guys go down. They've killed like 50,000 "insurgents" in the past how many months? It's like if they only showed you one team on the highlights of a football game on ESPN.

[Jeff Head]

"If I truly was a media whore do you think I would like
maybe get myself fixed up a little bit before I went on?"
Quote and pic of Cindy Sheehan - August 24, 2005

[soccermom]

What I find sad about this article is Matt Taibbi seems to think it is about as illogical that Saddam was linked to 9/11 as it is to think the US was behind it. No, I don't think Saddam was behind 9/11, but Taibbi's logic is as simplistic as it gets. Bin Laden wouldn't work with Saddam because Saddam was a secularist? So what? We worked with the Soviet Union during WWII. I wonder if Taibbi understands that the whole reason Bin Laden turned on Saudi Arabia is because the Saudis aided the US in the Gulf War.

[LarryDeRobio]

Excellent! I remembered seeing that picture from when you posted it previously when I read that comment in her little speech.