Our Loss

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7883

Our Loss
by David Michael Green | Jun 4 2007

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Most Americans know of Sheehan from the stand she took outside Bush's vacation ranch in Crawford, asking only that he meet with her. The sheer courage and simplicity of that act made for a compelling David versus Goliath story that few could not find inherently sympathetic.

Which is precisely why it drove conservative pundits ballistic, and why they launched their vitriolic personal attacks against her, just as they have with every other one of their critics or political adversaries. To observe the savaging of a mother who had given her son for this country, because she dared to ask inconvenient questions, was perhaps the greatest shame of all in an epoch of one astonishing political disgrace after another.

But that is precisely what happened. Fred Barnes said, "She's a crackpot". Michelle Malkin had the audacity to claim that Casey wouldn't approve of "his mother's crazy accusations". And there were much, much worse, and far, far more personal attacks beyond these.

Not to mention hypocrisy. Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with three fundamental propositions about Iraq: that we were lied into the war, that we are failing there, and that Americans should be coming home. Today, Bill O'Reilly says "It was the wrong battlefield. It was. And there's no getting around that. We made a mistake."

Leaving aside the known fact, based in documentary evidence, that it was no "mistake" at all, this is the same O'Reilly who only a few years ago argued that Cindy Sheehan - then making essentially the same arguments he makes today - was "in bed with the radical left", that "this kind of behavior borders on treasonous" and that she was linked to "people who hate this government, hate their country".


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Maybe this was once the land of the free and the home of brave, perhaps way back in the olden times of the twentieth century. But right now the free are at home with their wide-screen TVs and the brave are retiring from the field, exhausted and disgusted.

If that isn't the perfect formula for national decline, I don't know what is.