A small but telling drama of this war-blighted summer is playing out on a roadside some five miles from the ranch called Prairie Chapel where President Bush likes to spend his long summer holiday. For more than a week now Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq and fiercely opposed to the war, has been camping out as near to the ranch as the secret service will permit. She insists she will not leave until she meets the President in person. These are the dog days, and a bored White House press corps, marooned in central Texas with precious little news to report, is giving her more attention than she would probably otherwise get. But there is more to it than that.
Cindy Sheehan is the ghost at the Bush vacation feast, the ghost of reality suppressed.Consummate news managers that they are, the Bush crowd have long kept the brute at arms length. No administration in my memory has ever kept so relentlessly on message. None has boasted more proudly that the subtle greys of real life do not fit in with their Manichaean view of the universe. For them, it’s either black or white, good or evil, with us or against us. “We’re not big on nuance,” they loved to say, to distinguish themselves from those over-clever Clintons who preceded them.....
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It should be noted, however, that already the White House is using the well-tried tactic of insinuation and whispered denigration that it employed against Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who first blew the whistle on the manipulation of WMD intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war (another egregious example of how an “alternate reality” can be created). In the case of Ms Sheehan, might not grief be distorting her judgement, causing her to become the unwitting pawn of the anti-war movement?
But this time, I suspect, reality cannot be denied. The polls show that a majority of Americans now believe that the 2003 invasion was a mistake, that the war is making them less, not more, safe from terrorist attacks, and that some or all of US troops should be brought home. This time, the blithe post-modernist musings of the aide who lectured Ron Suskind have collided with harsh, irrefutable facts. For what fact, what reality, is harsher and more irrefutable than the futile deaths of 24-year-old Casey Sheehan and 1,850 other young Americans in the deserts of the Middle East? RUPERT CORNWELL, The Independent
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=86573
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