Best of the Web Today - August 15, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
The Sorrow and the Pity
Time magazine reports that Cindy Sheehan's family is "imploding":
Sheehan lost her job at Napa County [Calif.] Health and Human Services because of all her absences, she says. Husband Pat, 52, couldn't bear having [fallen son] Casey's things at home and put most of them in storage. "We grieved in totally different ways," Cindy says. "He wanted to grieve by distracting himself. I wanted to immerse myself." . . . The couple separated in June.
Daughter Carly, 24, wrote a poem that begins, "Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?" Surviving son Andy, 21, supports his mother in principle but recently sent her a long e-mail imploring her "to come home because you need to support us at home," he says.
The New York Times reports that Mrs. Sheehan's politics were the cause of her marital collapse:
She said she and her husband separated a few months ago as a result of the war, and of her activism. Although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalized.
The Times doesn't elaborate on Mrs. Sheehan's description of herself as "radicalized." Through her own words, unreported by either Time or the Times, she makes clear that she has embraced a grotesque ideology that goes far beyond garden-variety Angry Left paranoia--though it includes plenty of that, as National Review's Byron York reported last week:
"This is something that can't be ignored," Sheehan said during a conference call with bloggers representing sites like democrats.com, codepink4peace.org, and crooksandliars.com. "They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state."
"Our government is run by one party, every level," Sheehan continued, "and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government." Sheehan also called the 2004 presidential election "the election, quote-unquote, that happened in November."
Sheehan spoke at an April San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in February of providing material aid to terrorists. Here's an excerpt:
I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I'm going all over the country telling moms: "This country is not worth dying for." If we're attacked, we would all go out. We'd all take whatever we had. I'd take my rolling pin and I'd beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant. . . .
What they're saying, too, is like, it's okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. It's okay for the United States to have nuclear weapons. It's okay for the countries that we say it's okay for. We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now. It's okay for them to have them, but Iran or Syria can't have them. It's okay for Israel to occupy Palestine, but it's--yeah--and it's okay for Iraq to occupy--I mean, for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it's not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon.
Earlier in April, at a speech before the United Methodist Church in Venice, Calif., Sheehan likened Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to "Hitler and Stalin" and was particularly lurid in describing her hatred of Rumsfeld's then-deputy:
As soft-spoken and sincere-sounding as Paul Wolfowitz is, is there yet any sane adult in this country whose skin does not crawl when this murderous liar opens his mouth and speaks?
She concluded: "In their secret hiding places, while celebrating newly won fortunes with their fellow brass, these men must surely congratulate themselves with orgies of carnal pleasure as they mock the multitudes who are yet so blind as to mistake them for God's devoted servants."
The mainstream media have largely ignored Sheehan's crackpot views, and not only--perhaps not even primarily--for ideological reasons. Members of the White House press corps find the annual sojourn to Crawford deathly dull. They need something to do; they want bylines--and "heartbroken everymom" makes for a much more compelling story than "extremist hatemonger."
The journalists will soon move on, and her political allies may do so as well. For them she is a mere instrument. The White House press corps will discard her as soon as they return to Washington where there's real news going on. Serious opponents of the war in Iraq will cast her aside if her foul statements make her an embarrassment. When that happens, we can only hope that someone still cares about Cindy Sheehan--not as a story or a symbol, but as a human being.
'It's Freedom, Ma'am'
Blogger Mohammad Fadhil of IraqtheModel.com eloquently answers Cindy Sheehan (quoting verbatim):
I know how you feel Cindy, I lived among the same pains for 35 years but worse than that was the fear from losing our loved ones at any moment. Even while I'm writing these words to you there are feelings of fear, stress, and sadness that interrupt our lives all the time but in spite of all that I'm sticking hard to hope which if I didn't have I would have died years ago.
Ma'am, we asked for your nation's help and we asked you to stand with us in our war and your nation's act was (and still is) an act of ultimate courage and unmatched sense of humanity. Our request is justified, death was our daily bread and a million Iraqi mothers were expecting death to knock on their doors at any second to claim someone from their families. Your face doesn't look strange to me at all; I see it everyday on endless numbers of Iraqi women who were struck by losses like yours.
Our fellow country men and women were buried alive, cut to pieces and thrown in acid pools and some were fed to the wild dogs while those who were lucky enough ran away to live like strangers and the Iraqi mother was left to grieve one son buried in an unfound grave and another one living far away who she might not get to see again.
We did nothing to deserve all that suffering, well except for a dream we had; a dream of living like normal people do.
We cried out of joy the day your son and his comrades freed us from the hands of the devil and we went to the streets not believing that the nightmare is over. . . .
The mothers went to break the bars of cells looking for the ones they lost 5, 12 or 20 years ago and other women went to dig the land with their bare hand searching for a few bones they can hold in their arms after they couldn't hold them when they belonged to a living person.
I recall seeing a woman on TV two years ago, she was digging through the dirt with her hands. There was no definite grave in there as the whole place was one large grave but she seemed willing to dig the whole place looking for her two brothers who disappeared from earth 24 years ago when they were dragged from their colleges to a chamber of hell.
Her tears mixed with the dirt of the grave and there were journalists asking her about what her brothers did wrong and she was screaming "I don't know, I don't know. They were only college students. They didn't murder anyone, they didn't steal, and they didn't hurt anyone in their lives. All I want to know is the place of their grave."
Why was this woman chosen to lose her dear ones? Why you? Why did a million women have to go through the same pain?
We did not choose war for the sake of war itself and we didn't sacrifice a million lives for fun! We could've accepted our jailor and kept living in our chains for the rest of our lives but it's freedom ma'am. Freedom is not an American thing and it's not an Iraqi thing, it's what unites us as human beings.
David Duke disagrees.
Abortion Advocate Terminates Self
At least David Seldin has a sense of humor. On Friday Seldin, the brains behind the scurrilous NARAL Pro-Choice America ad alleging that Judge John Roberts countenances violence against postfetal-Americans at abortion clinics, announced in an e-mail that he was quitting his job as NARAL's communications director. His reason: He wanted to spend more time with his family!
As Slate's Jack Shafer noted a few years back, "I want to spend more time with my family" is right up there with "the check is in the mail" on the list of unbelievable utterances:
By citing family, the worker neutralizes the stigma and efficiently blocks further questions. No responsible reporter will allege a firing if she [sic] can't prove it, because that would risk a libel suit. Besides, only a pit bull would continue to tear into the flesh of a foe that has rolled over on its back to signal surrender.
But when a committed opponent of what his foes call "family values" says he wants to spend more time with his family, it's got to be at least partly meant as a joke. And to no one's surprise, the Washington Post reports Seldin quit because NARAL pulled the ad over his objections.
The Next Nominee, the Next Senate
Robert Novak last week offered an intriguing explanation of the NARAL ad:
This week's vicious attack on Judge John Roberts by the abortion lobby was not really a desperate effort to defeat him against overwhelming odds. Rather, it is part of an intricate game that not only determines the occupant of one seat on the Supreme Court but can set its ideological course for the next generation.
The current hard count for Roberts is 60 senators. That would be more than enough to confirm him and barely enough to end a filibuster. But it is not enough to further the grand strategy for a conservative court. At least 70 votes for confirmation may be needed to make it comfortable for President Bush to name somebody at least as conservative as Roberts to the next vacancy, which soon may be in the offing.
The 30-second television ad aired nationally by NARAL Pro-Choice America this week claimed that Roberts as a young Justice Department lawyer supported bombing of abortion clinics. In fact, he worked on a brief intended to protect peaceful picketing. NARAL's approach was not meant to sway the Senate but to pick off nervous Democrats and perhaps a Republican or two, keeping Roberts as close to 60 votes as possible. The president and his closest advisers then would have to ask themselves: If a nominee as squeaky clean as John Roberts cannot do better than this, can we risk nominating another conservative for the next vacancy?
We're not sure we agree. It seems to us that with 55 Republicans in the Senate and seven Democrats committed not to engage in partisan filibusters, the president will be able to get just about any nominee through, at least in this Congress. If the vacancy doesn't come until 2007 or 2008, though, all bets are off, at least until we know the outcome of the 2006 Senate elections. The filibuster compromise applies only to this Congress, so the compromising Democrats will be released from their no-filibuster obligation on Jan. 3, 2007.
If the Dems decide to filibuster in the 110th Congress, the Republicans will again have recourse to the "nuclear option." But by most counts there were only 50 or 51 votes before the compromise, so if the Democrats can make a net gain of just one or two Senate seats, and if antinuclear Republicans like John McCain and Lincoln Chafee stick to their guns (as it were), the Dems may succeed in returning to the status quo ante compromise and filibuster judges during the president's final two years--though red-state Dems who're up in 2008 may provide some resistance.
Lately people have been talking up the likelihood of big Democratic gains in 2006, but our very preliminary guess is that there won't be major shifts in the Senate. We base this on a trend that has emerged in the past three Senate elections. Here are the seats that have changed party since the 2000 election;
D pickup R pickup
2000
Delaware
Florida
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Washington
Nevada
Virginia
2001 Vermont*
2002
Arkansas
Georgia
Minnesota
Missouri**
2004
Colorado
Illinois
Florida
Georgia
Louisiana
North Carolina
South Carolina
South Dakota
* Sen. Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party; though nominally independent, he functions as a Democrat.
** In a special election, Republican Jim Talent reclaimed the seat to which Democrat Mel Carnahan had been elected after his death two years earlier.
Democrats did very well in 2000; Republicans did well in 2002 and very well in 2004. The result was almost a wash: Republicans picked up a total of 11 seats to the Dems' 10, so the Senate went from 54-46 Republican in 2000 to 55-45 today. But 10 of the 11 GOP gains came in red states, and six of the 10 Democratic gains came in blue states. That means there are now five fewer blue-state Republican senators and six fewer red-state Democratic ones.
This is a long-term trend. Before the 1980 election, for example, there were only five Republican senators from the South (meaning the erstwhile Confederacy plus Kentucky, all red states); today there are 20. Republicans held a Senate seat in California until 1992 and one in New York until 1998; today they are barely competitive in either state.
But this trend is self-limiting. Only seven senators are up for re-election in states that went for the opposite party in the past two presidential elections: Republicans in Maine, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and Democrats in Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota and West Virginia. The total rises to eight if you count New Mexico (Democrat Jeff Bigaman, currently the longest-serving junior senator), which went for Bush in 2004 but Gore in 2000.
Of course, Republicans are eyeing some blue-state seats (Minnesota, Washington, maybe Maryland) and Democrats some red-state ones (Montana, Ohio, maybe Tennessee and Virginia), and a trend could emerge that produces big gains for one party or the other, as happened in 1980, 1986 and 1994. But for the moment the 2006 election seems unlikely to yield a big swing in favor of either party--though even a small swing toward the Democrats could give them a big tactical advantage when it comes to blocking judges.
Raspberry Deserves One for This
Washington Post columnist William Raspberry says he's hoping "for a smoking-gun revelation that would disqualify John G. Roberts Jr." Why? Partly for ideological reasons--Roberts, Raspberry claims, would take the Supreme Court outside the "mainstream." But his more interesting objection is "the too-smooth path by which Roberts has arrived at this juncture":
Son of a wealthy steel executive, Roberts attended private schools, Harvard and Harvard Law School, then held a federal appeals court clerkship, followed a year later by a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice (now Chief Justice) William Rehnquist.
He then was named special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, and associate counsel to the president (at age 27) before joining one of Washington's top law firms. Then Roberts went to the office of the solicitor general of the United States and, for the past two years, a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The point: Nothing in that glide path suggests exposure to anything that might temper his conservative philosophy with real-life exposure to the problems and concerns of ordinary men and women. Roberts is undeniably bright, said my friend, but his life has been one of quite extraordinary privilege.
And then it occurred to me: Roberts's life has been amazingly like that of the man who wants to put him on the court--but with better grades.
Raspberry is at least partly consistent about this. In 1991 he grudgingly supported Clarence Thomas because of Thomas's humble origin. But we can't find anything to suggest that Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer came from the wrong side of the tracks, and Raspberry never faulted them for their "privilege."
Besides, everyone loves a good Horatio Alger story, but there's something ludicrous about Raspberry's poverty fetish. And what Raspberry is advocating is pure reverse discrimination: Sorry, you're too privileged. We don't hire your kind here.
Nah, Only 48.27%
"Are Half of All Americans Mentally Ill?"--headline, FoxNews.com, Aug. 15
There's Probably Still a Denny's Open
"Texas Tribe Flounders After Casino Shuts"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 14
Take Me to Your Liter
"The number of alcohol-related deaths has increased by nearly a fifth in four years, figures show."--BBC Web site, Aug. 15
Maybe They'd Win if They Stuck to Baseball
"The TV special will feature the first video footage of the Rolling Stones' tour, which plays Detroit on Aug. 31."--Associated Press, Aug. 13
"Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Killed, Tigers Blamed"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 12
Bottom Stories of the Week
If Cindy Sheehan didn't exist, journalists would have to invent her. Otherwise they'd be covering only stories like this one, from the Associated Press:
In the year since New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey told the world, "I am a gay American," his words have appeared on bumper stickers and his likeness on an action figure. But a year after McGreevey became the nation's highest-ranking, openly gay elected official, it does not appear he had much of a long-lasting effect on gay America.
Here in dour America, it didn't have much of an effect either. Oh, it cheered us up for a little while, but soon we were grumpy again.
Another AP story brings us this earth-shattering August news:
A U.S. man who long claimed to have played one of Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas in the original 1971 motion picture now admits he was lying.
Ezzy Dame confessed the fib Tuesday in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal. He said the false claim seemed harmless at the time but grew into a beast of a deception.
"There is something so special when a child looks at a little person and they're not scared or feel that they're looking at a freak. When you say you played that part, they look at you and smile. They see you as a human being," he told the newspaper.
"I never intended to harm anyone or my community by this little white lie. It was a little white lie that became my haunted nightmare."
What can one say but: "Oompa Loompa doompety doo, I've got a perjury rap for you. Oompa Loompa doompety dee, if you are wise you'll cop a plea." |
