I was going to wait and write on Pandagon when they had yet another post denigrating capitalism, but I couldn’t let this one go by. Amanda has a post dedicated to taking Dennis Prager apart, which is fine with me. I have no particular love for the man. Without a lot of time at my disposal (I’m having dinner with this guy), I’ll keep the focus of this post rather narrow.
She trips up here:
The only evidence that Sheehan is stupid or immmoral I’ve ever seen any conservative cough up is that she disagrees with them about the war and subsequently whether or not having her son 6 feet under is a good idea. They can’t make a good case for Casey Sheehan’s death being necessary, of course. The whole point of Cindy’s crusade has been to get President Bush to answer the simple question, “What noble cause did my son die for?” It’s been nearly a year since she staked him out at his ranch in Crawford to get an answer for that question and as of yet, he hasn’t come up with one.
No, it’s not just that she disagrees with the war, it’s that she hates her country with a ferocity that matches my own feelings for her. We’ll begin with a soft quote and proceed:
That lying bastard, George Bush, is taking a five-week vacation in time of war, … tells me why my son died in Iraq. I’ve got the whole month of August off, and so does he.
She neglects to mention that Bush did meet with her; there was no reason for a second visit because it would have legitimized the hysteria she’s peddling.
I admire President Chavez for his strength to resist the United States. Instead, Bush is waging a war of terrorism against the world.
Here she’s siding against her own country and with a dictator that is in the process of wrecking Venezuela.
You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East.
She will only accept one answer, but no noble cause is even remotely possible with this thankless shrew. Not even the National Security Strategy of 2002. No, it must be about oil, or some other conspiracy theory she dreamed up while sucking up to the tyrants of the world.
She also forgets that we are almost certainly the least imperialist country in human history that possesses our military and economic power. Or she doesn’t know what imperialism really is. My bet is on the latter. To take but one example, when Turkey’s parliament refused to give us basing rights to come in from the north into Iraq, did we kill the MPs that voted against us and put their heads on pikes? That’s what an imperialist would do, but we just came in full force from the south and parachuted into the north.
Are we not trying to provide a functioning country for the Iraqis to run for themselves? Yes we are, but that point is lost on the shrew.
Some more quotes, courtesy of Sweetness & Light:
We began the killing as soon as we stepped foot on these shores [of America] and the killing has gone on unabated for over 200 years.
Well, technically it’s more like 500 years, but I get the point. No cause for killing by this country could ever be just. Nevermind a war that separated us from tyranny and created a country whose highest ideal is liberty; nor a war that ended slavery and cost hundreds of thousands of lives (also in pursuit of liberty); or even a war that was fought to end Nazism. Not to mention a Cold War that defeated communism, which has been of great benefit to humanity. The shrew would prefer to spend her time sucking up to communists, rather than defeating them.
We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now.
Clearly, the shrew should not be allowed to handle a mop and bucket, given her state of mind. She lacks the competence.
Every member of Bush’s executive branch (past and present) and every member of Congress who voted to give George the authority to invade Iraq have innocent blood on their hands. For the next State of the Union address, maybe the hypocrites in Congress should shamefacedly display blood-soaked hands, instead of proudly wriggling fingers stained with ink to symbolize sham Iraqi elections.
Ditto from above. I could go on. I couldn’t find one of her most malicious quotes, but you get the point. She’s a loon.
Amanda continues along these lines:
Quick question to anyone who thinks Cindy Sheehan has a shallow moral system: Should people die for no good reason? If your answer is no, then you agree with her. It’s actually pretty simple. Through all the blather about “Judeo-Christian values” and “family values” and what other horseshit Prager and company want to pile on to argue for their moral superiority, at the center of this is that they can’t even manage to gather the moral strength to oppose getting people killed for no good reason.
Nifty trick. Only you must accept that it’s for no good reason, which she takes as a given. It’s not. The justification is the spreading of democracy as a defense against future terrorism. It’s a risky strategy, but it could well work. And it is a good reason because it’s intended to make the world, specifically America, safer in the long run.
This is debatable, but all of the nonsense that we entered into war for the profit motive requires a stunning propensity for conspiracy theories. The left won’t even acknowledge that there could even be a just reason for this war. The next time they advocate having our troops do a meals-on-wheels tour through Bosnia, I’ll remember and complain loudly. If we can’t justify a war that is fought with the intention of protecting this country, there’s no way we can justify a war in which our security is not threatened, even tangentially.
