They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they're not. They are the hate-filled, "Get Bush" crowd members who have now turned Cindy Sheehan's publicity stunt into a circus sideshow.
Sheehan's son, Casey, was a U.S. soldier who was killed last year in Iraq. She has staged a sit-in near the Crawford, Texas, ranch of President George W. Bush and claimed that the president killed her son.
Cindy Sheehan became an overnight darling of cable television, national newspapers and, of course, the left-wing anti-war groups. They should have stopped there.
Instead, they sensed an opportunity to parlay this woman's grief into their own selfish partisan purposes, but they ruined Sheehan's credibility.
First came the revelation that she already had an audience with the president last year in a condolence session with other families who had lost loved ones in Iraq. The Vacaville (Calif.) Reporter, Sheehan's hometown newspaper, recently reprinted an interview with her from that time.
Instead of harshly criticizing the president, she said "I now know he's 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."
That contradiction was just the tip of an embarrassing iceberg. Time magazine revealed that Sheehan's personal life has been in tatters. The publication said she lost her job because of frequent absences, separated from her husband in June, has been urged by her surviving son to return to California and has been accused by another relative of promoting her own "personal agenda at the expense of her son's good name."
And much sympathy for Sheehan was replaced with pity after her blog-based press conference last weekend, when she blamed the United States for world terrorism, claimed the United States "would be a fascist state" if not for the Internet, called for the impeachment of Bush and said he should go to jail for "war crimes."
If Sheehan was performing solo in this sorry soap opera, one could almost excuse her outrageous remarks as naïve.
Instead, her performance was orchestrated by a pair of Democratic operatives, Bob Fertik (co-founder of Democrats.com) and Joe Trippi (who managed the presidential campaign of Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean).
Add to that the support of the radical left-wing group Move-On.org and the mendacious filmmaker Michael Moore, and you've got a collection of full-time dissidents who felt no guilt over Sheehan's public humiliation.
America is not fooled. If Bush killed Sheehan's son, Casey, then so did the 29 Democratic senators who approved the Iraq war resolution in 2003, a list that included John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman.
But never mind the truth that a terrorist killed Casey.
Never mind that this charade may embolden terrorists in Iraq to fight longer against our brave volunteer military force. Never mind that Casey's sacrifice is overshadowed by this embarrassing spectacle. Soon, the cameras will be gone, the stories will stop, and Cindy Sheehan will go home.
But the radicals will find someone new to exploit and ignore the damage they cause.
Frank Beckmann is host of "The Frank Beckmann Show" on WJR (760 AM) from 9-11:30 a.m. Monday-Friday.
***...........We live in a period of history in which one of our major political parties is no longer motivated by a coherent ideology, but is energized by political nihilism. The Democrat Party, and the left in general, is in possession of an ideology that went bankrupt in the late 1960s with the end of the New Deal, big-government paradigm. They coasted for another 20 years or so on "feel-good" rhetoric, but with the Clintons, what emerged as the "unifying vision" within the Democrat Party wasn't a new ideology at all, but political nihilism -- cynicism, hatred, politics-of-personal destruction, moral ambivalence, anti-religion, anti-Americanism (i.e., being against everything that is good in America). Today's Democrat Party is identified more by what it is against than by what it is for, making it a reactionary party. About 20% of the electorat are hard-core political nihilists. Another 20% simply vote Democrat out of habit (union families, blacks, public employees). Another 8 or 9% are among the swing voters who simply vote Democrat for God-knows-why (probably ignorance). Cindy Sheehan is the poster child of the left's political nihilism.
The other thing which has given Cindy Sheehan noterity is that we now live in "Jerry Springerland." Personal loss in war is an intensely personal thing, where the personal agony used to be shared, if at all, within intimate circle of friends and family, where solace was received in places like one's church. Now, people tend to share their personal problems and conflicts in front of the entire world, via a voyeuristic media. It's unseemly, and horribly inappropriate to stick a camera in the face of a grieving mother and broadcast her personal anguish to the entire world. It's even more tacky and dysfunction to be a grieving mother who actually seeks that kind of attention. At that point, she becomes not a grieving mother tortured by unspeakable personal grief, but a media celebrity, or worse, a tool in someone's cynical political agenda. When she crosses the line to becomes a celebrity, normal, healthy people tend to start seeing her public display of "grief" as simply a publicity stunt. And what's even more despicable is that such a person is willing to be used as a shill by the political nihilists of our society. ..............***
http://my2cents.redstate.org/story/2005/8/18/135859/225