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Maureen Dowd has been on book leave from her normal perch at the NY
Times OpEd corner, and with this reentry she must have Bush wishing she was
writing an encyclopedia, it being August and his approval ratings lower than
ever, a few conservative groups grumbling about his Supreme Court nominee and
his Treasury Secretary admitting that the US economic growth has not helped the
middle and lower class, especially. Even with increased majorities in both houses of Congress, the White
House barely eked out two major pieces of legislation this session, while other
battles lay ahead, threatening to widen the breach with the GOP. It appears that Bush is ducking out in
Crawford from the Lame Duck label awaiting him back at the office…but one
determined mother camping out on the dusty road near the President’s ranch may
symbolize everything the polls are telling, and she has been issued an
ultimatum to leave before Thursday* or face arrest as a national security
threat. Not to worry, this is the same president who told reporters last week
at a roundtable that he didn’t care about polls. kwc Why No Tea and
Sympathy?
There's an angry mother of a dead soldier camping outside
his Crawford ranch, demanding to see a president who prefers his sympathy to be
carefully choreographed. A new CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll shows that a majority of
Americans now think that going to war was a mistake and that the war has made
the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorism. So fighting them there means it's more
likely we'll have to fight them here? Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged yesterday that sophisticated
bombs were streaming over the border from Iran to Iraq. And the Rolling Stones have taken a rare break from sex odes
to record an antiwar song called "Sweet Neo Con," chiding Condi Rice
and Mr. Bush. "You call yourself a Christian; I call you a
hypocrite," Mick Jagger sings. The N.F.L. put out a press release on Monday announcing that
it's teaming up with the Stones and ABC to promote "Monday Night
Football." The flag-waving N.F.L. could still back out if there's
pressure, but the mood seems to have shifted since Madonna chickened out of
showing an antiwar music video in 2003. The White House used to be able to tamp
down criticism by saying it hurt our troops, but more people are asking the
White House to explain how it plans to stop our troops from getting hurt. Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for
P.R., says she will camp out in the dusty heat near the ranch until she gets to
tell Mr. Bush face to face that he must pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Her
son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in a Sadr City ambush
last year. The president met with her family two months after Casey's
death. Capturing W.'s awkwardness in traversing the line between somber and
joking, and his love of generic labels, Ms. Sheehan said that W. had referred
to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting, and given her the sense that
he did not know who her son was. The Bush team tried to discredit "Mom" by pointing
reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her
husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him. But
even if they send out a squad of Swift Boat Moms for Truth, there will be a
countering Falluja Moms for Truth. It's amazing that the White House does not have the
elementary shrewdness to have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear
the woman out, or invite her in for a cup of tea. But W., who has spent nearly
20 percent of his presidency at his ranch, is burrowed into his five-week vacation
and two-hour daily workouts. He may be in great shape, but Iraq sure isn't. It's hard to think of another president who lived in such
meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters
with anyone who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that
is cognitively injurious. He's a populist who never meets people - an ordinary
guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to. Mr. Bush hails
Texas as a place where he can return to his roots. But is he mixing it up there
with anyone besides Vulcans, Pioneers and Rangers? W.'s idea of consolation was to dispatch Stephen Hadley, the
national security adviser, to talk to Ms. Sheehan, underscoring the inhumane
humanitarianism of his foreign policy. Mr. Hadley is just a suit, one of the
hard-line Unsweet Neo Cons who helped hype America into this war. It's getting harder for the president to hide from the human
consequences of his actions and to control human sentiment about the war by
pulling a curtain over the 1,835 troops killed in Iraq; the more than 13,000
wounded, many shorn of limbs; and the number of slain Iraqi civilians - perhaps
25,000, or perhaps double or triple that. More people with impeccable credentials
are coming forward to serve as a countervailing moral authority to challenge
Mr. Bush. Paul Hackett, a Marine major who served in Iraq and
criticized the president on his conduct of the war, narrowly lost last week
when he ran for Congress as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold in
Cincinnati. Newt Gingrich warned that the race should "serve as a wake-up
call to Republicans" about 2006. Selectively humane, Mr. Bush justified his Iraq war by
stressing the 9/11 losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire
freedom when his W.M.D. rationale vaporized. But his humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he
fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children
killed in Iraq is absolute. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/opinion/10dowd.html? NYT
ED: One mother in Crawford: Summertime often produces unexpected
media figures, and this is Cindy Sheehan's season. Ms. Sheehan, the mother of a
soldier killed in Iraq last year, is camping out near President Bush's ranch in
Crawford, Tex., and says she won't leave until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her
to discuss the war. There are many reasons for the flood of media attention she
is attracting: she has a poignant personal story and she is articulate - and,
let's face it, August is a slow news month. But most of all, she
is tapping into a growing popular feeling that the Bush administration is out
of touch with the realities, and the costs, of the Iraq war. Mr. Bush obviously failed to comfort Ms. Sheehan when he met with her
and her family. More important, he has not helped the nation give fallen
soldiers like Casey Sheehan the honor they deserve. The administration seems
reluctant to have the president take part in events that would direct
widespread attention to soldiers' funerals or to the thousands who have
returned with serious injuries. Perhaps most troubling, Mr. Bush is not leveling about where things
stand with the war. He continues to stay on
message, as he did with the platitude he offered last week: "We will stay
the course; we will complete the job in Iraq." The public knows that
things in Iraq are not going well on any number of levels, and deserves a
fuller, more honest discussion led by the commander in chief. Just 38 percent of the respondents in a recent Associated Press-Ipsos
poll, a new low, approved of Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq. That does not mean
the remaining 62 percent agree with Ms. Sheehan that the troops should come home
immediately. But it does mean that many Americans are with her, at least
figuratively, at that dusty roadside in Crawford, expecting better
answers. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/opinion/09tue1.html * A Mother’s Texas
Vigil http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/23984/ |
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