It's a bit embarrassing watching these aging hippies attempt to relive their glory days on a rural easement near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Ms. Sheehan, now thoroughly discredited as a radical kook, is spouting the old, old liberal line. Liberals have had the Iraq war stuck in their craw since the day the Senate voted to go to war, and their main disappointment seems to be that their plan to use that war to unseat Bush in 2004 didn't work out.
Now these anti-war types are stuck with a war they voted for, and their rationalization is that Bush lied to them. (Of course, all the intelligence everyone had access to at the time did not originate in the White House.) Yet the American people side with the hawks, and Democrats can't embrace the medusa Sheehan without assuring their own political demise. So they will "sympthize" with her little faction, but only the most foolish will risk a photo op.
Sheehan, off-topic of her dead hero son, thinks our current effort in Iraq is "not about bringing democracy to Iraqis," but rather to "have a permanent base" there. (She also says, wide-eyed, that Syria's occupation of Lebanon is the very same thing as the U.S. effort in Iraq -- go figure.) Despite the fact that NO American claims to want to conquer or annex Iraq, she insists we are a bunch of no-good "imperialists" (including her son, one supposes). That's delusional thinking by all non-partisan accounts, but it's not news -- liberals have claimed their homeland is "imperialist" for one thing or another since long before 9/11. I really think they would have preferred America seek no justice, drain no swamp, in the wake of the attacks on Manhattan and Washington. Just hold Al-Qaeda's hands and find out why the poor dears are upset -- then "negotiate" at the U.N., and apologize to the French for our recent impolitenesses. And, one imagines, settle in with "Reds" on the DVD player at the end of their exhausting day. This, to a liberal, is a reasonable course.
One also can't help but wonder whether Ms. Sheehan was this controlling of her son when he was alive. He was a grown-up, and clearly making his own decisions. Having his mother belittling his choices after he's died for his country seems downright bitchy. The son would no doubt disagree with EVERYTHING the mother is saying as she pursues her own leftist agenda using her dead son's fame to do so. Personally, I think she should go to her son's grave and apologize, but maybe their relationship wasn't that good.
These days, liberals including Ms. Sheehan are stuck in the past, constantly "reminding" everyone within earshot of the supposed invalidity of the war in Iraq. Of course, at the time of the original debate, we all knew there were various reasons for going to Iraq -- back issues of news magazines will be found discussing a variety of points besides WMDs -- WMDs were highlighted as the item most likely to persuade nations at the U.N. of the necessity to finally take some action. But now, liberals claim WMDs were the only item ever discussed, in an effort, one supposes, to deflect their own embarrassment for ALSO believing at the time that there were plenty of WMDs under Saddam Hussein's control. And for agreeing to Bush's concept of "draining the swamp."
Draining the swamp where terrorists are born and raised was bound to require lancing the boil at its center, and Iraq is, after all, centrally located in the middle east, and convenient to the whole swamp. I'm not sure anymore that liberals understood what "drain the swamp" meant, or even where the swamp is. If you typed "the swamp" into your GPS unit, you might just get a big red "X" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with spokes leading out to Syria, Iran and various other West-hating, Islamist-radical nations.
Let's never forget, since WMDs matter so much to liberals, that it is Saddam's fault that all the world's intelligence agencies as well as most of its citizens believed he had WMDs. Saddam ran U.N. inspectors out of his country rather than allow them to inspect his facilities because he was determined to foster the impression that he did indeed have lots of prohibited weapons programs. The fact that he and Tariq Aziz may have been playing a high-risk-for-them game of "let's pretend" (assuming they didn't transport their WMDs to Syria as the war approached) certainly can't be laid at Bush's door.
And don't forget those 17 flaunted U.N. resolutions for which Saddam was owed punishment. Saddam tried to make a mockery of his own deal to stop the first gulf war. He badly miscalculated, again. He was hoist on his own petard.
