| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
21 Aug 2005 06:57:10 PM |
| Object: |
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21rich.html
--
"Yes, I served in combat during Desert Storm." --Osprey (lying about his
military service) Message-ID: <1116416113.714744.65540
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
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| User: "LeMod Pol" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 07:52:05 PM |
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"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil
that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
--
LP
A little sunlight is the best
disinfectant," Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis
commented. "Never more so
than when it exposes
towering hypocrisy."
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| User: "james g. keegan jr." |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 08:01:22 PM |
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LeMod Pol <modpol@execulink.com> wrote in
news:430920A7.1D367A7D@execulink.com:
"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil
that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan,
as usual the coward has no data and only his teenage name flames.
--
"Yes, I served in combat during Desert Storm." --Osprey (lying about his
military service) Message-ID: <1116416113.714744.65540
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 08:50:09 PM |
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LeMod Pol wrote:
"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the
vigil that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
This just in, fuckface - Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says that the
Iraq War is looking more and more like Vietnam. No matter how much you
spew your childish rants, the Question still remains:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
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| User: "The Other Donald" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 10:13:58 PM |
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<spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:1124675409.075796.91970@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
LeMod Pol wrote:
"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the
vigil that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
This just in, fuckface - Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says that the
Iraq War is looking more and more like Vietnam. No matter how much you
spew your childish rants, the Question still remains:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
WMD's!!!
No......it was those terrorists that hit New York!!
No.....the Iraqis needed Democracy(tm)!!
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| User: "BOB" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 11:06:48 PM |
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"spartakus@my-deja.com" <spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote in
news:1124675409.075796.91970@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
LeMod Pol wrote:
"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the
vigil that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
This just in, fuckface - Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says that the
Iraq War is looking more and more like Vietnam. No matter how much you
spew your childish rants, the Question still remains:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
Actually Spartakus, we aren't. No "war" was ever officially declared in
Iraq. It is an invasion and occupation by the U.S. and nothing more.
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| User: "The other Donald" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 11:26:22 PM |
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"BOB" <sd@sd.net> wrote in message news:Xns96B9D6C7A1137SD@68.6.19.6...
"spartakus@my-deja.com" <spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote in
news:1124675409.075796.91970@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
LeMod Pol wrote:
"james jackass keegan jr." brayed:
August 21, 2005
The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan
By FRANK RICH
CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the
vigil that ambushed a president:
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
This just in, fuckface - Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says that the
Iraq War is looking more and more like Vietnam. No matter how much you
spew your childish rants, the Question still remains:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
Actually Spartakus, we aren't. No "war" was ever officially declared in
Iraq. It is an invasion and occupation by the U.S. and nothing more.
Don't start getting all logical an' ***** with your fancy-schmancy facts!
--
-Donald in Austin
AA #2104
Apatriot #22
Atheist FF/EMT
.....and ordained minister
Stork pin recipient: May 1, 2003 -Madelyn
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
22 Aug 2005 12:02:15 PM |
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The other Donald wrote:
"BOB" <sd@sd.net> wrote...
"spartakus@my-deja.com" <spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
Actually Spartakus, we aren't. No "war" was ever officially declared
in Iraq. It is an invasion and occupation by the U.S. and nothing
more.
Don't start getting all logical an' ***** with your fancy-schmancy facts!
Yeah! Geez, Bob! How are you going to get all those high school
graduates recruited for an invasion and occupation?
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| User: "BOB" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
22 Aug 2005 12:11:31 PM |
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"spartakus@my-deja.com" <spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote in
news:1124730135.383266.143350@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
The other Donald wrote:
"BOB" <sd@sd.net> wrote...
"spartakus@my-deja.com" <spartakus@my-deja.com> wrote:
Why are we fighting a war in Iraq?
Actually Spartakus, we aren't. No "war" was ever officially declared
in Iraq. It is an invasion and occupation by the U.S. and nothing
more.
Don't start getting all logical an' ***** with your fancy-schmancy facts!
Yeah! Geez, Bob! How are you going to get all those high school
graduates recruited for an invasion and occupation?
Lie to them about WMDs and Iraqi ties to 9/11? It worked before.
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| User: "Ricky Ticket" |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
21 Aug 2005 10:42:09 PM |
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On Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:52:05 -0400, LeMod Pol wrote
(in message <430920A7.1D367A7D@execulink.com>):
Like james jackass keegan, the NY Times'
Frank Rich is a lying fool who loves to
twist the truth.
When you quote a plagiarist like Keegan does, using a liar to make a point is
gravy. ;o)
--
"keep it up and give your detractors some credibility" --James G. Keegan Jr.
(A man that thinks 57,800 google hits means truth)
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| User: "james g. keegan jr." |
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| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan |
22 Aug 2005 08:19:38 AM |
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Ricky Ticket <not@given.com> wrote in
news:0001HW.BF2EC1ED003A86541D348940@news.east.earthlink.net:
When you quote a plagiarist like Keegan does, using a liar to make a
point is gravy. ;o)
thus speaks the person who felt it necessary to forge osprey.
--
"Yes, I served in combat during Desert Storm." --Osprey (lying about his
military service) Message-ID: <1116416113.714744.65540
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
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