Friday, August 12, 2005
It's the President, Stupid!
The Republican radical right - the folks running things - cannot abide any dissent that escapes liberal blogland & marches around all the barriers & traps they set up to protect them - & us - from an alternative view of the universe. Relatively few people noticed or even knew about Cindy Sheehan before she arrived in Crawford Texas. After all, who the hell other than George Bush himself goes to Crawford to get attention? But this is not slick campaign. Cindy has been speaking out for a long time. Her home website looks like it was designed in 1995. The organization itself looks puny. Two things pushed her to the front page: 1. The lack of anything else to write about in Crawford. 2. The horrendous casualties inflicted on American soldiers in Iraq over the past month, especially the Marine unit from Ohio. No contrived "Freedom Walk" can disguise the fact that it is the President of the United States, not the middle-aged mother of a dead soldier, who is harming the morale of our military.
The liberal/left should counter the mad dog attacks on this woman from the right. But let her stand out there on a Texas highway & speak her own peace. She has a credibility & authority none of us bloggers can match. If other Gold Star Mothers disagree with Cindy, fine. Let them speak also. Out of it will come the first real debate about what went wrong in Iraq. Because the spotlight isn't on Cindy so much as it is on two thousand graves & thousands of maimed soldiers & on the Commander-in-Chief who put them in harm's way with lies & has no plan to rescue them from a civil war we fertilized in a foreign land. Meanwhile, every cent added to a gallon of gasoline puts billions into the wallets of George Bush's friends. as does the pumped up war budget he created on their behalf.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
The liberal/left should counter the mad dog attacks on this woman from the right. But let her stand out there on a Texas highway & speak her own peace. She has a credibility & authority none of us bloggers can match. If other Gold Star Mothers disagree with Cindy, fine. Let them speak also. Out of it will come the first real debate about what went wrong in Iraq. Because the spotlight isn't on Cindy so much as it is on two thousand graves & thousands of maimed soldiers & on the Commander-in-Chief who put them in harm's way with lies & has no plan to rescue them from a civil war we fertilized in a foreign land. Meanwhile, every cent added to a gallon of gasoline puts billions into the wallets of George Bush's friends. as does the pumped up war budget he created on their behalf.
