Cindy Sheehan And Co.: Nothing To Say But `I Hate You`

When I read that Move America Forward`s "You Don`t Speak for Me, Cindy" tour, a counterweight to Cindy Sheehan`s hate-America brigade, was stopping for a press conference in nearby Burbank, I made my way there to provide another face in the pro-America crowd. By my best estimate, there were some 30 to 40 of us, all agreed on what seemed to me an uncontroversial purpose — to express support for the troops who put themselves at risk on our behalf.

That wasn`t an agenda that a half dozen Anti-Everything (AE) agitators could countenance.

When articulate and poised military mom Deborah Johns spoke proudly of her own son serving in Iraq, the AEs tried to shout her into silence, forcing her to supplement her microphone with a bullhorn. I recalled Cindy Sheehan`s wild charge that Congress had "made our Constitution null and void" (I`d love to hear her legal analysis) and wondered what she`d think about her new supporters` disregard for the right of free speech as applied to anyone but themselves.

Such rudeness annoyed but didn`t surprise me. The Left could be defined by its contempt for opposing viewpoints. Thus its preference for ad hominem attacks — Republicans are Nazis, Bush is Hitler, war supporters are chickenhawks — to reasoned argument. What did strike me, though, was the utter vacuousness of that side`s slogans and, apparently, its thought.

Typical signs: No War for Oil. Bush Lied, My Friend Died. War Isn`t the Answer. If You Like War, Send Your Own Children. U.S. Out Of ...blah blah blah.

Granted, a slogan is what`s suited to a poster board. But thoughtless cliches reflect no shorthand for reasoned positions, only empty-headed detachment from reality. War for oil? I thought 3,000 Americans were incinerated four short years ago in New York City. Send your own children? I`m not aware that the "children" now fighting for this country were sent by their parents. War isn`t the answer? What, exactly, is the question?

One protester shrieked that "fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia! Why didn`t we invade THAT country?" I challenged: "If we had, you`d be here protesting that." "I`m against all war" was the anti-response before she stormed off in search of a TV camera to scream into.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote "that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The marketplace-of-ideas metaphor has an implicit corollary: that responsible speech ought to contain some meaningful and coherent thought. The Left contributes nothing to the intellectual marketplace when it has but a single, paranoid notion — that the United States can do nothing but evil.

Sheehan, the Left`s latest hero, expresses that view in multiple, delusional ways: "Since we first stepped on this continent," she barks, "we have been responsible for death and destruction." "We are waging nuclear war in Iraq right now." (Which would explain the "100,000 innocent Iraqis died" I read about on another poster.) And my favorite: America`s greatest talent is "killing people."

All of which reflects the sentiment at the core of Left-thought everywhere: "This country is not worth dying for."

But such single-minded hate and paranoia is worse than just thoughtless and anti-American. It pointedly ignores, and implicitly embraces, true evil: Saddam`s penchant for filling mass graves with children, for instance, or the Iranian mullahs` sponsorship of terrorism and their subjugation of all people under their boot, particularly women.

Worse still, such non-thought inevitably devolves into vicious fantasy, like the anti-Semitic canard that it`s the Jews who cause our problems, the Jews who bring us war.

"My son," Sheehan rants, "joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." "It`s okay for Israel to occupy Palestine...but it`s not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon." (Conversely, one wonders: if Syria`s longtime occupation of Lebanon never troubled her, why does Israel`s "occupation" of "Palestine" fill her with such rage?) And foulest of all: "Neo-conservatives [read: Jews] killed my son."

No wonder Sheehan is praised by neo-Nazi David Duke and by the white supremacists at National Vanguard, where she "has moved the hearts of millions" for recognizing that "Jewish power is toxic to any society that allows it to exist."

At the least, Sheehan and her hate-abetting hangers-on — who now include race baiter Al Sharpton, sixties relic Joan Baez and fake president Martin Sheen — should be treated as what they are: non-contributors to the marketplace of meaningful ideas.

Here is a story of one of Cindy Freedom Fighters,

Iraq Extremists 'Booby-trap Dead Child'

News Edition: 09/15/2005

A US Army commander claims that extremist fighters in northern Iraq committed atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, torture and the booby-trapping of a murdered child's body.
The accusations by Colonel HR McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, included some of the most graphic and specific charges by an American military officer during the ongoing battle for control of Tal Afar, a city about 80 kilometres from the Syrian border that has been an insurgent stronghold.

"The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine - in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents; beheadings and so forth," McMaster said in an interview from Tal Afar with reporters at the Pentagon.

McMaster said Tal Afar is not yet under the control of the 5,000 Iraqi government forces and 3,500 to 3,800 US troops that have been fighting together there for the past two weeks. He predicted eventual victory but said it was impossible to know how long it would take before the Iraqis can control Tal Afar by themselves.

"Is Tal Afar secure? No, it's not secure," he said. "Is the enemy on the run in Tal Afar? Yes, the enemy's on the run. And we're going to conduct some follow-on operations in the next week or so to relentlessly pursue the enemy across the city."

McMaster repeatedly condemned the tactics of the insurgents, whom he called terrorists and extremists.

"Not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers," he said.

His comments came two days after the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, purportedly accused American forces of using poison gas in the Tal Afar fighting, a charge that US officials have denied. The accusation was made in an audiotape posted on the internet on Sunday and attributed to al-Zarqawi.

McMaster alluded to that accusation and said he believed the insurgents had planned to detonate chemicals in a building in a residential area and then claim that US forces had employed poison gas against civilians.

"In one of these buildings the enemy had big barrels of chemicals that had explosives implanted in the chemicals, wires running around them. The whole house was rigged for demolition," he said.

When US troops went into the house, "immediately their eyes began burning, their throats began burning. So they withdrew out of the house immediately and then we conducted reconnaissance with some chemical protective gear, with a remote reconnaissance capability, into the house. And we could tell that the thing was rigged with chemicals."

McMaster also said US troops found manuals that described how to make "these kind of chemical dirty bombs and so forth."

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.