Demagogue

I don't have particularly strong feelings about the Cindy Sheehan story. She's a grieving mother who lost her son in Iraq, posted outside of Bush's ranch during his 5-week vacation, who is essentially protesting the war in Iraq. Perhaps her story should do more to tug at my heartstrings, but I suppose I'm far too jaded.

However, the conservative crapstorm that has been kicked up over Sheehan is pretty appalling. I understand that they don't want her to be viewed as a sympathetic person, that they want to undermine the message of a grieving mother, but they've really gone round the bend on this one. From K-Lo over at the Corner pointing out that David Duke has endorsed Sheenan's protest, to Fred Barnes calling her a "kook" and a "crackpot," as another person claims that Democrats are using Sheehan as a "prostitute." Even Michelle Malkin has reached a new low, posting that Sheehan's husband has allegedly filed for divorce because of Sheehan's protest. C'mon people, I'm not really sure what good this is doing. While it's obvious Sheehan stirs up some pretty strong feelings in some people, don't they realize that they're only fanning the flames of this story? That by using the same character assasination approach to Sheehan as they would with a politician that it might be making her more sympathetic, not less?

The woman a private citizen, acting within her rights to protest a president, a war, etc. She has her simplistic, sappy supporters and she has her exceptionally vicious detractors. The only thing that is truly clear to me is that Bush could have headed this whole thing off if he had just met with her on Day 1.

But what really irks me is that apparently there is no way that anyone who isn't a "crackpot" can think the Iraq war was a bad idea-- despite the fact that over 60% of Americans apparently now feel that way. All of this also reminds me of the ugliness and unrest of when we first went to war, although for some reason I had believed that with the passing of time people's views had softened a little, that as the story get more complicated people stopped viewing the war so black-and-white. How naive of me. Let's hope this claptrap is just representative of the over-caffeinated, drunk-on-our-own-sense-of-influence that exists in the blogosphere, not America at large. Otherwise the gap between two perspectives is truly, officially unbridgable.