Second Thoughts

by digby

When I saw that Cindy Sheehan had been arrested I was sort of disappointed that she’d decided to do any kind of stunt. My feeling was that she didn’t need to because she is a living symbol of anti-war sentiment all by herself and would have made a statement just by being there. This government is always so protective of their King and his pageants that I didn’t find it all that surprising that she would be removed for wearing a t-shirt.

This morning, while listening to president Bush spit the words freedom and democracy as applause lines, I read Glenn Greenwald’s latest piece, which reminded me that I’m beginning to lose my awareness of being a frog slowly being brought to a boil. Sheehan did not break the law, she has a perfect right to wear a t-shirt in the capital and her arrest was an outrage. These things matter beyond politics or strategy.

Sheehan was wearing a shirt that had the number of American deaths written on it. It was not vulgar or disrespectful in any way. It is as much an expression of support for the troops as the one for which Mrs Young was ejected (and for which she was not arrested, despite the fact that unlike Sheehan she resisted and called the police “idiots.”) And all this concern “for the troops” plays out as this failed president used them as both a prop for his unpopular policies and a cudgel to silence his critics:

Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor. A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison . put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country . and show that a pledge from America means little. Members of Congress: however we feel about the decisions and debates of the past, our Nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies, and stand behind the American
military in its vital mission.

Nice trick. Speak with candor as long as you support me. It’s the same trick that rhetorically conflates dissent with treason, using the phrase “aid and comfort.” In this case, his speechwriters very deftly forced the entire congress to leap to its feet to applaud their own irrelevance — they ended up cheering the assertion that “second-guessing” in “hindsight” is unpatriotic and that their only option is to do as he orders. Nice democracy we’ve got here.

Rick Perlstein reminded me that it was Coretta Scott King who raised Martin’s consciousness about the war in Vietnam. She was speaking out about it for two years before he was, marching in her first peace march in 1965. Perhaps it was because she, like Cindy Sheehan, was a mother. Or maybe she was just more willing to expend moral capital on a cause that can be marginalized as unpatriotic.

From Perlstein:

In Taylor Branch’s new At Canaan’s Edge about that 1965 march: “Martin Luther King commended the draft of Coretta’s address, but canceled plans to speak himself. (She exhorted the crowd never to forget that democratic commitment made America a historic great nation: ‘This is as true in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam.’).”

It is a sad irony that on the very day she died, the president cheaply invoked her great contribution at virtually the same moment his government was silencing the woman who carries her message today. Arresting Cindy Sheehan for asking how many more American troops must die on the same day that Coretta Scott King passsed away is perfectly emblematic of the bankruptcy of every soaring tribute George W. Bush makes to freedom and democracy.

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