If you haven't read it yet Frank Rich's editorial in the
NYT "The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan" is excellent and makes clear some information rarely seen elsewhere. Namely that when all else fails BushCo always attempt to distract the American people from the problem by changing the focus on the person and go after their character. This "swift-boating" of Cindy hasn't worked and here's why:
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.
More....
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.
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?"
So "swift-boating" Cindy doesn't work because this is ultimately about Casey and Sherwood and all the other fallen soldiers and the illegality of this war. The American public understands this and scoffs at the smear campaign of Cindy. And Bush doesn't get it...
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 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.
So let the Swift-boating attempts continue...you see, they are having the opposite effect than the intended one and BushCo look meaner and more calloused with each new accusation of Cindy.
By the way our friends at Britain's UK Observer do a nice job summing up the whole affair at Crawford. This article is worth the time to read also
Here's a fun thought from it:
Perhaps someday a President will greet Cindy Sheehan this way: 'So you're the little woman who stopped the Iraq war' New York Daily News columnist Mike Goodwin said.
What are your thoughts on this subject?