Hitchens on Hardball
"O‘DONNELL: I‘m sure also the president did not anticipate that while he was spending a five-week vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, that he would be witnessing a mom, Cindy Sheehan, who has been camped outside his ranch now, demanding a meeting with the president, saying she won‘t leave until that happens.
Christopher, do you think that this represents—or she represents some sort of tipping point in public opinion in America?
HITCHENS: Certainly not. She has, just today, lied about a statement that she made several times before to the effect that her son was killed in a war run by a secret Jewish cabal within the administration. She now says she didn‘t make that statement. She did make that statement. So as well as being an hysterical paranoid ideologist, or at least being manipulated by people who are, turned this into camp fruitbag and nutbag, she has decided not to have the courage or maybe the cowardice of her conviction. She now says she didn‘t make a statement that she definitely did.
FINEMAN: I think, Christopher.
HITCHENS: And she is also inviting a terrific riposte. What if we were to say, very well, the conduct of this war will depend on an opinion poll which we‘ll take of relatives of the fallen in Iraq, only they can decide, only they have the authority. She would lose.
Do I favor such a thing? No. I‘m pro-war but I would be totally against that. It would be handing our policy over to an.
(CROSSTALK)
O‘DONNELL: Howard, what about her.
HITCHENS: . minority which she has allowed our profession, disgracefully, to be used as a megaphone for a fraud.
O‘DONNELL: What about her statement? She is a private citizen to some degree. And yet she has made these comment about U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. And she says she is no longer going to pay taxes in the United States. Is she fair game, like a politician is, now that she makes these statements?
HITCHENS: Certainly.
FINEMAN: And I would agree with Christopher on that. I think he should be honest in his feelings about these...
(LAUGHTER)
FINEMAN: He always hides his feelings. But I don‘t think that she personally is a tipping point. But I do think that things are changing under George Bush‘s feet. Now you made the Harry Truman comparison, a lot of Democrats I know, including Jack Valenti, used to work for Lyndon Johnson, makes the Lyndon Johnson comparison in the sense that the Johnson presidency a generation ago lost control of the war in Vietnam because they lost control of public opinion.
And whatever Christopher may say about Cindy Sheehan, the fact remains that if you look at the polls, the American people are turning very skeptical about the war and George Bush‘s handling of it. There‘s just no two ways about that.
HITCHENS: Well, there are very good reasons for doubt and for dismay, no serious person doesn‘t have them, but there are two other matters here. First there is the dignity of the office. You don‘t get to see the president by behaving like this. There are a lot of people waiting in line patiently who have also had sacrifices in Iraq. She has already had a meeting. She has given two discrepant accounts of it, both of them hysterical. I don‘t know what her mood swing is today. She now thinks she‘s owed another meeting. I don‘t think so.
(CROSSTALK)
HITCHENS: It‘s undignified and she has become the prisoner of a paranoid political (INAUDIBLE) which go from her endorsers Michael Moore to her latest endorser, David Duke, all of whom are saying, yes, it‘s true, there‘s a secret Israeli cabal that runs the show, that her son was killed in effect for nothing. Now this is insulting and undignified and ungraceful.
O‘DONNELL: We‘re going to talk more about Cindy Sheehan. And coming up, we‘re also going to talk about how the Democrats waved the white flag in opposing the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. We‘ll be right back with more from Christopher Hitchens and Howard Fineman.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O‘DONNELL: And we‘re back with Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman and Vanity Fair‘s Christopher Hitchens.
Cindy Sheehan, does she help or hurt the president? And I ask that because she may hurt the president, some people think, because it focuses a lot of attention on the opposition to the Iraq war. But does she help him in some sense because she is calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops, a cut and run policy, and that puts the Democratic Party in a difficult spot?
FINEMAN: Yes. You don‘t have to have Christopher‘s view of Cindy Sheehan to agree with many Democrats who want to stay as far away from her as possible. There are these vigils that moveon.org are running, you‘re not going to see any Democratic elected officials at them, or very few. There are 1,500 of them. You won‘t see a dozen Democrats at them because they don‘t want to run as the anti-war party.
As a matter of fact, as they gear up for the midterm elections, they want to run on everything but the war on the theory that it is George Bush‘s problem to handle and anything that they say can be interpreted as questioning the war and they don‘t want to do that. They want to let the voters do it. They don‘t want to do it themselves.
HITCHENS: Howard is always the model of judiciousness and objectivity, but let‘s just say another thing about this. This is supposed to be a pseudo humanitarian campaign. It‘s all about death, the loss of people and so on. Suppose her advice is taken. The president says, you know, this bleeding heart woman with her mad political friends has persuaded me that we should announce tomorrow that we‘re pulling out.
Well, the number of American who would be killed when that was announced in Iraq is beyond count. If the al Qaeda forces there, the Zarqawi forces heard this, they want to say it is because of our work, they would start really blitzing and shooting them as they were leaving. And we would leave Iraq.
O‘DONNELL: But you agree.
HITCHENS: It would become another Afghanistan—it would become another Taliban-ized country which would—how does anyone with any respect for human life demand that this be allowed to happen?
O‘DONNELL: You think there is going to be a huge backlash against Cindy Sheehan.
HITCHENS: Well, I think there should be. I think our profession should stop acting as her megaphone. Until I published her real political opinions in Slate yesterday, she had to answer no more questions than, how does it feel? OK? I object. I shouldn‘t have had to do that.
I said, this woman is mouthing the most sinister piffle from Michael Moore and David Duke. She should be held responsible for what she thinks. When she was asked about it finally by Anderson Cooper yesterday, she said, I didn‘t say it. She‘s also a liar.
O‘DONNELL: OK.
HITCHENS: And she should strike her tent and go home and the president should ignore her and so should everybody else. It should be over by the end of the week."
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