Leonard Pitts, Jr.: Sheehan's question deserves answer

[question everything]

LEONARD PITTS JR. THE MIAMI HERALD
Sheehan's question deserves answer

August 26, 2005

"I want to ask George Bush: Why did my son die?"
–Cindy Sheehan

Sheehan will get her wish to meet with President Bush the day winged donkeys perform an air show in the skies above the South Lawn. In other words, never.

In part this is because the president is famously intolerant of criticism and notoriously fumble-tongued when working without a script, so his handlers would rather chew glass than send him out to confront an angry protester who knows exactly what she believes and why. It is also because no president can afford to be seen as having been bullied into doing something. So Sheehan's vigil near the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch is likely to continue until the end of Bush's extended vacation without reaching resolution.

Unless you count embarrassing a president who badly needed embarrassing. In which case, Sheehan's demand for a meeting has already been a smashing success.

(snip)

Not that they haven't given it the old school try. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News derides her as a political operative, Rush Limbaugh says her story is not "real." Some critics observe that Sheehan's protest has driven her and her husband apart. Others note that she's already met with Bush. He spoke with her and members of other grieving families in June of last year, after which she described his demeanor as respectful. She now says he acted as if he were at a party.

(snip)

Meantime, the president has mounted a belated counter-offensive, insisting in speeches this week that while he respects Sheehan's grief and her right to protest, she is wrong to oppose his war. For good measure he trots out yet again the specter of a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. This connection exists only in his mind.

(snip)

It's a lot of sound and fury, but to find the significance, you have to go back to the question Sheehan wants to put to the president. And to recent polls indicating that more and more of us are beginning to ask the same thing. Not just why did her son die, but why have more than 1,870 American sons and daughters died? Why have 14,000 more been injured? Why have an untold number of Iraqis also been killed and wounded? To find weapons of mass destruction? To liberate an oppressed people? To fight the war on terror? Some other of the shifting rationales that sound so tinny as the casualty count rises like floodwater?

(snip)

Pitts can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050826/news_lz1e26sheehan.html

[Nikki Stone 1]

1. You found this article in a San Diego paper?

Interesting.

[question everything]

4. Yes, and not the first time

Also see their editorial about "Attack of the flake" (Robertson)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x150718

But when a high-profile Bush family friend recommends killing a high-profile foreign leader and the White House ducks comment – it was the State Department that called Robertson's remarks "inappropriate," not Bush press secretary Scott McClellan – then of course it's going to cause shock waves, especially since Chávez has said the United States wants him dead.

[ChiciB1]

2. WOW... San Diego! The WORM TURNS!! n/t

[Nikki Stone 1]

3. I know. I was just looking at the link.

??

[TomInTib]

5. Wonder if Cindy can stick it out 'til the end of *'s term. And then

follow him back to Crawford for his last, very extended vacation - the one we all look forward to.

[Cha]

6. Leonard Pitts Jr..says it like

I thought, too."In part this is because the president is famously intolerant of criticism and notoriously fumble-tongued when working without a script, so his handlers would rather chew glass than send him out to confront an angry protester who knows exactly what she believes and why."

But, I don't agree with the part about.. "No president can afford to be seen as having been bullied into doing something."

If bush had been a truly(I know I know)compassionate conservative :puke: he would have gone out to talk to her and had a great genuine photo op(you BLEW it, rove..ya shoulda promised bush something special if he did it..you could always plant a bug in his ear.)

There didn't need to be any "bullying" involved..but, of course, this is the bushwa and they don't do anything with class.