Angry in the Great White North

It's been ages since I spent any serious time on Cindy Sheehan, but it's nice to know that some people have not forgotten. Take, for instance, Samuel Bostaph, a professor of economics at the University of Dallas.

I rank an entire section (see point 4) in his essay praising Cindy Sheehan.

Now that's recognition.

Janke has made a cottage industry of scurrilous attacks on Cindy Sheehan’s mental health, veracity, marital situation, personal finances, political views and true regard for her dead son.

I've been dilligent, but Cindy Sheehan provided all the information.

Janke has no information on why there is no gravestone; he has no information on whether Cindy Sheehan paid cash for the car and, if so, from whence the cash; he has no information on exactly what insurance amounts were paid to Sheehan and when. So, he takes this absence of knowledge and uses it to libel a woman he has never met, and knows virtually nothing about, except what he reads in newspapers or receives in gossip.

Actually, I had a lot of that information based on conversations with family members, neighbours, and a reporter from the area. I also researched the dates and payout schedule of the insurance policy available at the US military website.

Bottom line is this: Cindy Sheehan bragged about her new car to a reporter who dutifully quoted her. The grave remains unmarked. Money for one thing and not for the other. Draw your own conclusions.

Sludge from Janke’s pit is still being circulated on the web despite origins that are reminiscent of the harvesting of the orcs from the mud in The Lord of the Rings.

I'm amazed at the constant stream of hits I get to old Cindy Sheehan stories. Thanks for noticing, Professor.

As for the mud thing, well, Samuel Bostaph has attempted before to make tortured and bizarre analogies to movies:

In 2001, an animated film from Pixar Animation Studios was released and became extremely popular with both adults and children. Monsters, Inc. is set in the city of Monstropolis, where all monsters live. A corporation that gives the title to the movie employs "scarers," monsters who venture out of the city every night to enter the human world through the closets of children. Their job is to scare children into screaming because the screams can be collected and used to generate the electricity that powers Monstropolis.

Monsters, Inc. is a useful analogue for understanding the main purpose that President George W. Bush’s "war on terror" serves. Since September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq have served as useful monsters in generating screams from the American public. The resulting enhancements in federal government power have enabled the Bush administration to use the military forces of the United States to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq and to install puppet governments in both countries.

Uh, yeah. I like the way Professor Bostaph stays a hair's breadth away from saying that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the neo-con cabal in Washington. Almost, but not quite.

The result has been the killing without distinction of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.

Old number, long since dismissed as a statistical fantasy.

George W. Bush is our Mr. Waternoose (although the cartoon character looks more like Dick Cheney). Unfortunately, he and the "scarer" monsters in his administration have succeeded in strapping the American public to a scream machine and are extracting more screams to provide more power to the executive branch. Their latest ploy is the demonizing of Iran, the creation of yet another monster for further power enhancement.

I saw Monsters, Inc. as a fable concerning nuclear power. And refreshingly, the solution was not to eliminate nuclear power and to return to living in the trees, but to discover a new and more powerful form of nuclear power that allowed the technological society on Monstropolis to flourish and continue to grow without sacrificing economic prosperity.

But then as a product of the orc-breeding sludge pits of Isengard, I can be expected to lack imagination. Let's return though to the issue at hand -- my unfair treatment of Cindy Sheehan. Does Professor Bostaph, who sees the evil President Bush lurking in a children's animated cartoon, have a point? Besides that I'm a bad person, that is.

Cindy Sheehan is a liar, and a serial one at that. Over and over again she has been caught. She says her family is behind her, but in truth they will have nothing to do with her. She says her husband supports her but in truth he filed for divorce while she was on the road and demanded significant financial compensation. She says she wants only peace but when she complains that the media is spending too much time covering Hurricane Katrina and not enough time covering her latest protest, she reveals herself to really be after publicity. She praises terrorists who slaughter Israelis, and then denies ever saying any such thing, even though the speech is caught on tape. Her denials depend on paranoid claims of faked emails and fraudulent message board postings and media conspiracies.

She has long since faded away, coming into focus only as a curiousity from time to time, usually when she is caught cavorting with America's enemies on foreign shores.

She still helps out with the anti-war movement, as Professor Bostaph proudly explains:

In the past few months, Cindy Sheehan and I have co-authored two anti-war articles that have appeared in online journals as politically diverse as LewRockwell.com, Michaelmoore.com, palestinechronicle.com and political affairs.net – a Marxist online journal.

But here is where Professor Bostaph makes an interesting point. He himself is no Marxist. Quite the opposite. He is an economic libertarian, severely critical of "progressive" theories and practices.

But he and Cindy Sheehan can make common cause over their opposition to George W Bush:

The point is that mere association in a common cause does not connote a commonality of views on other matters. I would add that anyone who knows Cindy Sheehan is very much aware that she is not liable to be "hijacked" by anyone – she is an implacable foe of Bush’s war and accepts all allies in that fight, despite other differences in views. Her allies stand with Cindy Sheehan; none of them "run" her.

Fair enough. But then let's consider that notion as applied to the other side. Would it be acceptable for George W Bush to be seen at a neo-Nazi rally as long as he made it clear that he only shared with them deep suspicions about Iran's nuclear intentions and nothing else? Of course not. Nor would the media or the political establishment give that excuse more that a second of consideration before attacking the president like piranhas smelling blood in the water.

And rightfully so. Picking and choosing elements here and there of a person's beliefs or of an organization's goals is not balance, as Professor Bostaph would have us believe.

It is rank opportunism.

When Cindy Sheehan is seen arm-in-arm with Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez, congratulating the strongman "for his strength to resist the U.S.", you can't reasonably suggest that it is unfair to be concerned that Cindy Sheehan is supportive of Chavez's scheming with terrorists from the Middle East (he is known to be providing support -- usually official identity documentation that could then be used to secure US visas). When Cindy Sheehan marches with Code Pink activists, can any person reasonably square Code Pink's active support of anti-American insurgents with financial donations (founder Medea Benjamin managed to get $600,000 in supplies and cash to Iraqi insurgents, the same insurgents who killed Casey Sheehan) with Cindy Sheehan's disavowal of violence?

But these niceties are not important to Cindy Sheehan, as long as Chavez and Code Pink and Michael Moore help get her the attention she craves (the attention she so pitifully cried out for during the Hurricane Katrina episode). Left or right, it doesn't matter -- as her work with Professor Bostaph shows. That fact that she has no qualms about the people who can help her stay in the spotlight makes me wonder if she believes in anything at all. The fact that she and supporters like Professor Bostaph think we ought not to be concerned about the company she keeps and what that says about her true motives and goals is rather patronizing.

Cindy Sheehan has a goal. Whether it is to stop the American action in Iraq, or to impeach the president and every member of the government above the level of congressional page, or to get back on the front pages of the newspapers in the US, it is hard to tell. She might not even know for certain. But Cindy Sheehan will use any person to advance that agenda, no questions asked. Professor Bostaph tries to cast this as a virtue. It is not. Her non-stop mourning borders on lypemania, while the casual and non-critical means by which she selects and discards allies suggests monomania. If you are in a position to help her, she will use you. If you get in her way, well, that's not likely to go well for you, as Democratic senators who have declined to do Cindy Sheehan's bidding (Hillary Rodham Clinton and Diane Feinstein, for example) have learned.

If I were Professor Bostaph, I'd be nervous about the moment when I accidently disagree with Cindy Sheehan.

Pretty good for a bit of orc-sludge, eh?