A Question That Deserves to Be Answered

A Question That Deserves to Be Answered
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald

Friday 26 August 2005

I want to ask George Bush: Why did my son die?
-- Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan will get her wish to meet with President Bush the day
winged donkeys perform an air show in the skies above the South Lawn. In
other words, never.

In part this is because the president is famously intolerant of
criticism and notoriously fumble-tongued when working without a script, so
his handlers would rather chew glass than send him out to confront an angry
protester who knows exactly what she believes and why. It is also because
no president can afford to be seen as having been bullied into doing
something. So Sheehan's vigil near the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch
is likely to continue until the end of Bush's extended vacation without
reaching resolution.

Unless you count embarrassing a president who badly needed
embarrassing. In which case, Sheehan's demand for a meeting has already
been a smashing success.

This is largely because Sheehan has one quality most protesters lack:
moral authority. Her 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Baghdad last year.
So it's hard for the attack dogs of the Republican right to go after her
with the smear-the-messenger vitriol they usually unleash when someone says
heretical things about the great and powerful Bush.

Criticized

Not that they haven't given it the old school try. Bill O'Reilly of Fox
News derides her as a political operative, Rush Limbaugh says her story is
not ''real.'' Some critics observe that Sheehan's protest has driven her
and her husband apart. Others note that she's already met with Bush. He
spoke with her and members of other grieving families in June of last year,
after which she described his demeanor as respectful. She now says he acted
as if he were at a party.

Sheehan has explained the discrepancy by saying that when she met the
president, she was still in ''shock'' over her son's death and that her
anger has grown over the intervening year as evidence mounts that there
never were any weapons of mass destruction and that Bush was fixated on
attacking Iraq almost from the moment he took office.

Meantime, the president has mounted a belated counteroffensive,
insisting in recent speeches that while he respects Sheehan's grief and her
right to protest, she is wrong to oppose his war. For good measure, he
trots out yet again the specter of a connection between Iraq and the Sept.
11 attacks. This connection exists only in his mind.

It would all be the same old song, except for the way Sheehan's protest
has galvanized opponents of the war, given face and voice to their gnawing
anger over a costly conflict whose resemblance to Vietnam is becoming
inescapable. They have coalesced around her with an alacrity suggesting a
movement that had only been waiting for a leader. What began as a mother's
lonely protest has become a well-funded encampment to which celebrities,
publicists, ordinary citizens and, yes, representatives of the extreme
left, have gathered eagerly.

The Question

It's a lot of sound and fury, but to find the significance, you have to
go back to the question Sheehan wants to put to the president. And to
recent polls indicating more and more of us are beginning to ask the same
thing.

Not just why did her son die, but why have over 1,860 American sons and
daughters died? Why have 14,000 more been injured? Why have an untold
number of Iraqis also been killed and wounded? To find weapons of mass
destruction? To liberate an oppressed people? To fight the war on terror?
Some other of the shifting rationales that sound so tinny as the casualty
count rises like floodwater?

Or, was it not all simply for the stubborn hubris of a man unable to
admit when he has erred and the blinkered morality of a frightened nation
unwilling to call him on it?

I care nothing about Cindy Sheehan's marriage or her previous meeting
with George Bush; she's asking the right question. I suspect that's
precisely why some people care about those things so much.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12481085.htm
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Off Topic War Stuff Still hurts my heart Bill
    ... > is prepared to continue her protest outside President Bush's ranch ... > Sheehan said she found little comfort in his comments. ... > led about 50 demonstrators near the Bush ranch Saturday. ...
    (sci.med.cardiology)
  • One mothers loss becomes a problem for the president
    ... Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here ... president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State. ... Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to ... adviser, and Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff - that she ...
    (misc.news.internet.discuss)
  • OT: Is Sheehan a Spark or a Flicker?
    ... Is Cindy Sheehan the spark igniting an antiwar movement that threatens the Bush presidency? ... "Her plea for Bush to explain what 'noble cause' her son Casey died for in Iraq last year also has ... who has camped out for almost two weeks near President Bush's central ...
    (alt.guitar.amps)
  • Re: Cindy Sheehan Met With Bush Last Year
    ... >> Bush, ... Eleven weeks later, the Sheehan family traveled ... >> visit with the president in Seattle. ... >> Drudge included that quote in his Monday morning report, ...
    (alt.politics.bush)
  • Re: Should this woman be arrested?..........
    ... > prepared to continue her protest outside President Bush's ranch through ... > Sheehan said she found little comfort in his comments. ... > about 50 demonstrators near the Bush ranch Saturday. ...
    (rec.music.beatles)