Ms. Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.
But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.
Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early on Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Mr. Bush's ranch, Prairie Chapel, Ms. Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she says will be her home until the president relents or leaves to go back to Washington. A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.
The media attempt to make this war illegitimate is naturally going to be heard loudest from those who have sacrificed the most. It was only a matter of time before some grieving mother would succumb to the media barrage and blame Bush. Now the media is covering that as if were an independent phenomenon.
That we lost more people in a single World War II battle than we've lost in Iraq doesn't make the news, and neither does the amount of enemy kills. You'd get the impression that our men are sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery helpless.
The media is trying to convince people that it would be much better to go back to the nineties when we ignored terrorism. FDR could never have won the war in Europe had the media taken this approach. Hitler did not invade us nor was he a danger to. FDR would have been spread too thin and focusing his attention in the wrong place.
The Hiroshima anniversary reminds me that world opinion expects us to sacrifice the lives of our men rather than drop the bomb that ends the problem. The catch-22 is that if we drop the bomb the media will criticize the President for being heartless and a renegade to world civility. If the President sends men to carefully defeat someone and bring order, then the casualties are too high a price. In short, without saying it, the media just does not want to see any U.S. force until the knife is at our neck.
Mrs. Sheehan could just as well be picketing the United Nations to protest the appeasement, half measures, and oil for food scandal that made this war inevitable. I mean, Saddam may have lost power on his own if not for the illegal oil deals that kept him rich and powerful. It would be true and more to the point, but it wouldn't fit the media's desire to discredit Bush and war in general.
2 comments:
That last point is critical.
Don't know about yous, but I'm not hearing anyone around here talking about this non-story. All they care about in these parts is whether T.O. is going to produce for the Eagles this year.
The media is always going to be critical, that's just a fact of life. THE KNOWING-DOING GAP by Pfeffer and Sutton explains that people sound smarter when they are critical then when they agree, and one gets ahead at work by talking not by doing.
The media is driven by emotion, not intellect. The story is where the emotion is. There is a tremendous amount of emotion in a grieving mother that cannot be rivaled by the complacency of another fellow's intellectual support for the war.
Mainstream media will always seem to support the liberal agenda, because the agenda is emotion-driven. The people loved FDR because they perceived him as a caring paternal type. Popular opinion for his war was very supporting, despite the massive sacrifices we were forced to make as a nation. Conservative presidents are not viewed by the great unwashed as caring for the plight of the little guy, so the swell of emotion which the media seeks out is with the dissidents.
War will continue to divide the nation until some schmo like Joe Biden becomes president and connects with both the common man and the intellectual man, while leading us to fight a just war. I'm not stumping for Biden, just suggesting that if a Democrat were aggressively fighting this war, the mainstream media would likely fall in line behind him.
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