Cindy Sheehan

I thought I ought to take a look at the case of Cindy Sheehan and the article linked above in the New York Times.

Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of Casey Sheehan, a 24 year old American soldier killed in Iraq, has come under attack from the usual right-wing forces for camping outside the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas by way of an anti-war protest. One bright spark at the New York Times has called the attack "Swift boating".

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 article, if it's to be believed, points to a collapse in support for the Iraq war among the American public. It's also a resumé of the various victims of Bush smears over the reasoning behind and the conduct of the war

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.

There's more on why the "sliming" [yuk] of Cindy Sheehan hasn't been working.

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.

so the generalised smears haven't been working. So now what? Have you guessed? Accuse her of anti-semitism that's what. Here's what Cindy Sheehan is alleged to have written, though I gather there is some controversy about that

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy...not for the real reason, because the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn't changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq...in fact it has gotten worse.

Well the right-wing blogs are apoplectic, as are Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz. On one blog someone wondered why the MSM (mainstream media) hadn't picked up on this "Cindy is anti-semitic" business. I must say I was surprised that Frank Rich didn't mention it. Also if you google "cindy sheehan" "anti-semitism" you get lots of blogs and fringe type sites but not much mainstream.

Update - I have just received an email purporting to come from Cindy Sheehan. She says that she didn't write the "offending" email. Hmm. And while I'm here, Bat sent this link to Information Clearing House where Alexander Cockburn "incidentally also blows six shades of shit out of Hitchens" on the subject of Cindy Sheehan.

Christopher Hitchens attacked Cindy Sheehan, of course. Called her a LaRouchie! Why? No reason given. He obviously reckons "LaRouchie" is one of those let-her-deny-it slurs, like "anti-Semite". Let's suppose Hitchens was writing in similarly nasty terms about Hitchens. He'd probably remember that in 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it's cracked up to be. In Epstein's memory Hitchens belittled the idea that six million Jews died, said the number was much less.

So, under Hitchens' rules of polemical engagement, was does that make Hitchens? A holocaust denier, a guy who has Faurisson and David Irving's books under his pillow. A Jew hater, or--if you believe his sudden discovery (privately denied by his own brother on at least one occasion) at a mature age that his mother was Jewish--a Jewish self-hater. Of course Hitchens revels in Cindy Sheehan's denial that she said in an email that her son died in a war for Israel. Hitchens writes that this denial makes her "a shifty fantasist". What would Hitchens, who's an on-the-record admirer ("a great historian") of the work of Nazi chronicler David Irving say about Hitchens' shifty denial of Epstein's recollection? What fun he would have with the witnesses the panic-stricken Hitchens, well aware that "holocaust denier" is not part of the resume of a Vanity Fair columnist, hastily mustered for his defense, a woman and a man present at that famous dinner in the Royalton. One his close friend, Anna Wintour, the present editor of Vogue and the other, Brian McNally, a longtime friend and business associate.

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.