Sounds like one of our resident, mulit-sockpuppet trolls!
George M. Carter
**
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21rich.html
Op-Ed Columnist
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 21, 2005
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil
that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that
fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an
intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside
the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was
no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists
had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his
national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once
again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms.
Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of
the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not
attack inside the United States in 2001.
When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts.
But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan
could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character
assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by
his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a
critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is
especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a
president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had
"other priorities" during Vietnam.
The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents
with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But
the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism
czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who
publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored
vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph
Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as
"courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save
American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its
perpetrators to jail.
True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News,
where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The
right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry
Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary
sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying
attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to
declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged
documents - there's nothing about it that's real."
But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is
yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of
political support for the Iraq war.
When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest
priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's
character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11
inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an
insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's
abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that
persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph
Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration
twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent
W.M.D.'s.
The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's
"wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have
attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget
about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait,
much of the public has not.
The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr.
Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly
synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless
carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a
gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her
ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by
actually meeting with her.
The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story,
not the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll
notice, almost never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there
because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble
intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris,
incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.
Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle Scout:
a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve his
country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six
other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at
the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been
mutilated in Falluja and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was
almost a year after the president had declared the end of "major
combat operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.
According to the account of the battle by John F. Burns in The Times,
the insurgents who slaughtered Specialist Sheehan and his cohort were
militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric.
The Americans probably didn't stand a chance. As Mr. Burns reported,
members of "the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force"
abandoned their posts at checkpoints and police stations "almost as
soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the
militiamen in unchallenged control."
Yet in the month before Casey Sheehan's death, Mr. Rumsfeld typically
went out of his way to inflate the size and prowess of these Iraqi
security forces, claiming in successive interviews that there were
"over 200,000 Iraqis that have been trained and equipped" and that
they were "out on the front line taking the brunt of the violence."
We'll have to wait for historians to tell us whether this and all the
other Rumsfeld propaganda came about because he was lied to by
subordinates or lying to himself or lying to us or some combination
thereof.
As The Times reported last month, even now, more than a year later, a
declassified Pentagon assessment puts the total count of Iraqi troops
and police officers at 171,500, with only "a small number" able to
fight insurgents without American assistance. As for Moktada al-Sadr,
he remains as much a player as ever in the new "democratic" Iraq. He
controls one of the larger blocs in the National Assembly. His
loyalists may have been responsible for last month's apparently
vengeful murder of Steven Vincent, the American freelance journalist
who wrote in The Times that Mr. Sadr's followers had infiltrated
Basra's politics and police force.
Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the
war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another
mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last
Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker,
was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing
security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for
W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't
exist."
As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks
after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents'
Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine
featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval
Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications
that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote.
(Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush
sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national
security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant
words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the
Union speech.)
Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some
aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for
keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and
spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately
manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans'
sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the
start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased
military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why
Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended
funeral services for the military dead. It's why January's
presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops,
was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished
from the Inaugural Address.
THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once
too often. When Mr. Bush's motorcade left a grieving mother in the
dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far.
The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has
at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war's
critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand
jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on
sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the
photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any
more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in
Iraq.
