[Mb-civic] Cindy Sheehan and George W Bush

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are three articles about Cindy and George---the first from media 
critic Norman Solomon, the 2nd and editorial from the mainstream 
hometown newspaper of Houston, TX, and the 3rd from the L.A. 
Times.......

Rage Against the Killing of the Light 

By Norman Solomon 
t r u t h o u t | Perspective 
Wednesday 10 August 2005 
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081005B.shtml

Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in US history 
when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of 
solemnly patting death on its head. 

Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet - most of all - 
war is about death and suffering. War makers thrive on abstractions. 
Their media successes depend on evasion. 

President Bush has tried to keep the loved ones of America's war 
dead at middle distance, bathed in soft fuzzy light: close enough to 
exploit for media purposes, distant enough to insulate the commander 
in chief's persona from the intrusion of wartime mourning in America. 

What's going on this week, outside the perimeter of the ranch-style 
White House in Crawford, is some reclamation of reality in public life. 
Cindy Sheehan has disrupted the media-scripted shadow play of 
falsity. And some other relatives of the ultimately sacrificed have been 
en route to the vigil in the dry hot Texas ditches now being subjected to 
enormous media attention a few miles from the vacationing president's 
accommodations. 

At this point, Bush's spinners are desperate to divert the media 
spotlight from Sheehan. But other bereft mothers arriving in Crawford 
will hardly be more compatible with war-making myths. 

Consider the perspective of Celeste Zappala, whose oldest son 
Sherwood Baker was a sergeant in the Pennsylvania National Guard 
when he died 16 months ago in Baghdad. She is a co-founder of Gold 
Star Families for Peace, and what she has to say is gut-wrenching and 
infuriating: "George Bush talks about caring about the troops who get 
killed in Iraq. Sherwood was killed protecting the people looking for 
weapons of mass destruction on April 26, 2004. This was one month 
after Bush was joking [at the Radio and Television Correspondents 
Dinner, on March 24] about looking for weapons of mass destruction. 
And then my Sherwood is dead trying to protect people looking for 
them because Bush said it was so important to the safety of our 
country." 

Disregarding the tacit conventions of jingoistic newspeak, Zappala 
adds: "I don't want anyone else to go through this, not an American, 
not an Iraqi, no one. As a person of faith, I firmly believe we have the 
ability to provide better answers on how to resolve conflict than what 
Bush is offering us. I've tried to meet with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, I 
was turned away by armed guards. It's incumbent upon everybody to 
take responsibility about what is happening in our country. I have no 
recourse but to go to Crawford to do what I can to change the 
disastrous course we are currently on and to bear witness to the true 
costs of this war." 

The true costs. Not the lies of omission. 

War PR and war grief have collided at the Crawford crossroads at a 
time when the Bush administration is in the midst of launching its scam 
about supposed plans to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq. On 
Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a spokesman for 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "said he did not know how many 
extra troops might be needed during the referendum and election 
period" through the end of this year. The AP dispatch added: "Other 
officials have said that once the election period has passed and the 
troop total recedes to the 138,000 level, a further reduction in the 
range of 20,000 to 30,000 is possible next spring and summer. That 
could change, however, if the insurgency intensifies or an insufficient 
number of US-trained Iraqi security forces prove themselves battle-
ready." 

When a mass killer is at the helm of the ship of state, taking a bow 
now and again while "Hail to the Chief" booms from big brass bands, a 
significant portion of the country's population feels revulsion. And 
often, a sense of powerlessness - a triumph for media manipulation. 
Passivity is the health of the manipulative media state. 

Cindy Sheehan and Celeste Zappala have joined with others in 
Crawford to insist that death is not a message for more death - that we 
can understand death as a profound reality check, imploring us to 
affirm and defend life. 

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light," Dylan Thomas wrote. The 
unavoidable dying of life is bad enough. The killing is unacceptable. 

Norman Solomon is author of the new book War Made Easy: How 
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Excerpts are 
posted at WarMadeEasy.com http://www.WarMadeEasy.com. 

***

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/3307239

Houston Chronicle

Editorial

Aug. 11, 2005, 7:37PM

PEACE MOM
Mother of soldier killed in Iraq symbolizes 
nation's desire for justification of war

Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Nothingis more emblematic of American democracy than the idea of 
one person standing up for his beliefs and in the process becoming the 
catalyst for a national debate. In the arena of civil rights, Rosa Parks' 
refusal to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus was such an act. 
During the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg's decision to give the media 
the Pentagon Papers detailing the secret history of U.S. involvement in 
Southeast Asia was another.

Now Californian Cindy Sheehan's August vigil on a sweltering roadway 
near President Bush's Crawford ranch has given a human voice and 
face to the revulsion of the carnage in Iraq. Sheehan, the mother of a 
24-year-old Army specialist killed in Iraq last year, wants a face to face 
meeting with Bush to ask him what mission was worth her son Casey's 
life.

In a previous meeting a few months after his death, Sheehan says, the 
president seemed unaware of who her son was, addressed her as 
"mom" during the encounter and acted almost lighthearted. Now she 
wants a deadly serious discussion of why America invaded Iraq and 
how long the bloodshed will continue.

Those are questions on the minds of millions of Americans, who see 
the list of dead and injured American personnel growing along with the 
expenditure of billions of U.S. tax dollars, with no end in sight. Polls 
reflect the growing unease of the country with the president's handling 
of the war. 

Approval of the Bush war policy has fallen below 40 percent. As 
Sheehan questions the war, she is voicing the concerns of a majority 
of Americans.

In a way, the White House set the stage for Sheehan's vigil by saying 
Bush's five-week hiatus at the ranch was really a working vacation to 
allow him to talk to everyday folks about the issues that concern them. 
The likes of Cindy Sheehan don't come along every day, but she wants 
to discuss an issue that concerns millions of Americans who want to 
hear answers that go beyond the familiar "stay the course."

Even Richard Nixon, often described as paranoid about critics, visited 
antiwar protesters at the Lincoln Memorial in 1970.

Yet Bush has not yet found it in himself to meet a grieving mother or 
invite her to the ranch to discuss his policies. Thursday Bush told 
reporters he sympathized with Sheehan but that pulling out of Iraq 
"would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay 
the foundations for peace." Sheehan responded that the best way to 
show compassion would be to meet with her and other parents of 
soldiers killed in action.

Bush previously dispatched his national security adviser and an aide to 
meet with Sheehan's group, but that only increased the perception that 
Bush cannot bring himself to face his critics. Until the president 
addresses the doubts about the conduct of the war that Cindy 
Sheehan now symbolizes, the voices of the opposition will only grow 
louder. 

-------

 Mother's Protest at Bush's Doorstep Raises 
the Stakes
    By Edwin Chen and Dana Calvo
    The Los Angeles Times

    Thursday 11 August 2005

    Crawford, Texas - For more than a year, a modest bungalow known 
as "Peace House," located a few miles from President Bush's ranch, 
has served as a headquarters for antiwar activists. It is lonely work, 
with little more than a skeleton crew on hand much of the time.

    But then Cindy Sheehan hit town.

    The 48-year-old mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was 
killed in an ambush in Baghdad last year, is consumed by the kind of 
grief that turns into a furious determination to do something - in her 
case, to confront the president and force him to explain why her son 
died.

    Now, in the space of just a few days, what started out as a 
seemingly quixotic personal mission has become something of a 
phenomenon - with media swarming around Sheehan, leading liberal 
and antiwar activists parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought 
voice, and political experts in both parties working to assess what role 
she may have in galvanizing the public's gathering unhappiness with 
the increasing American casualties in Iraq.

    Antiwar leaders hope that putting the spotlight on Sheehan will 
motivate Americans who oppose the war, creating a political force 
strong enough to compel the Bush administration to change course.

    MoveOn.org and other liberal groups have rushed to provide 
support, offering media expertise and attempting to assemble a corps 
of others who have lost relatives in Iraq or have family members 
serving there.

    Liberal voices have swung into action on the Internet as well. On 
Wednesday, Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi organized a 
conference call with Sheehan for bloggers, aiming to garner more 
publicity. By Wednesday afternoon, "Cindy Sheehan" was the top-
ranked search term on Technorati.com, the search engine for blog 
postings.

    The White House, meanwhile, has sought to cope with Sheehan's 
vigil without abandoning its strategy for dealing with the families of 
troops who have died. On a number of occasions, Bush has met with 
bereaved relatives - including some who have challenged him sharply 
on the war - but he has done so privately, away from news cameras 
and reporters.

    Sheehan, a Vacaville, Calif., resident who opposed the war even 
before her son's death, was a member of one such group in June 
2004. She came away from that meeting dissatisfied and angry.

    "We wanted [the president] to look at pictures of Casey, we wanted 
him to hear stories about Casey, and he wouldn't. He changed the 
subject every time we tried," Sheehan said. "He wouldn't say Casey's 
name, called him: 'your loved one.' "

    Sheehan, a co-founder of the antiwar group Gold Star Families for 
Peace, has said she would remain in Crawford until she got to see 
Bush face to face.

    Until a cloudburst forced her to move to Peace House early 
Wednesday morning, Sheehan had been camping in a tent along a 
road about two miles from Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch. On Saturday, 
the day she arrived in Crawford, two senior White House aides - 
national security advisor Stephen Hadley and deputy chief of staff Joe 
Hagin - left the ranch to meet with her on a dusty road for 45 minutes.

    That, she said, was not satisfactory.

    By Wednesday night, Sheehan had given so many interviews that 
she was sucking on lozenges to soothe an inflamed throat. Her ears 
were sore from cradling a telephone. Her media advisor, newly arrived 
from San Francisco, said Sheehan had developed a fever.

    None of that stopped her. Whether talking to newspaper reporters, 
People magazine or radio and television interviewers - some from as 
far away as Japan - she was relentlessly on message.

    "I don't believe his phony excuses for the war," she said of Bush in 
an interview with a CBS reporter for the network's Northern California 
affiliates. "I want him to tell me why my son died.

    "If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged 
- if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil."

    Sheehan is certainly not the first to denounce the president over the 
war. From the beginning, activists have been outspoken in criticizing 
Bush's policy and his stated reasons for sending U.S. troops into Iraq.

    For the moment however, the personal nature of Sheehan's protest 
- with its edge of raw emotion - and the concentration of news media 
staked out in Crawford, where Bush is spending much of August, have 
combined to raise her voice above the crowd.

    "Anything that focuses media and public attention on Iraq war 
casualties day after day - particularly [something] that is a good visual 
for television, like a weeping Gold Star mother - is a really bad thing for 
President Bush and his administration," said independent political 
analyst Charlie Cook.

    "Americans get a little numb by the numbers of war casualties, but 
when faces, names and families are added, it has a much greater 
effect," he said.

    "Cindy Sheehan has tapped into a latent but fervent feeling among 
some in this country who would prefer that we not engage our troops in 
Iraq," said Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, president of the 
Polling Company, based in Washington.

    "She can tap into what has been an astonishingly silent minority 
since the end of last year's presidential contest. It will capture 
attention."

    But other analysts predicted that Sheehan would soon fade from the 
scene.

    "The president has an Iraq problem, but I don't think it's much 
worsened by Mrs. Sheehan," said professor Stephen Hess of George 
Washington University. "One Gold Star mother is a sympathetic figure, 
but collectively - as Gold Star Families for Peace - she is a movement 
and, as such, can be countered by a countermovement.

    "I think the president might have defused the situation if he had 
invited her in instantly," Hess said, predicting that GOP strategists 
would soon mount a counterattack.

    Already, there were signs of just that.

    Some have suggested that Sheehan is disloyal to criticize the 
president in time of war. Even in Vacaville, Sheehan said, some people 
say she is shaming her son's memory. Conservative blogger Michelle 
Malkin disdainfully called the activists promoting Sheehan "grief 
pimps."

    The antiwar activists who have rushed to Sheehan's side are all too 
well aware of the danger that her moment in the spotlight could 
become just another partisan shouting match.

    Said Tom Matzzie of MoveOn.org: "Cindy reached out to us. We're 
e-mailing our members about her story today, running a print ad in 
Waco [Texas]. Cindy is a morally pure voice on the war, so we're trying 
to keep the focus on her and not jump in and turn it into a political 
fight."

    Since Sheehan arrived in Crawford, Peace House has been 
transformed into a beehive.

    On the porch, bottles of water - and a huge box of collapsible pink 
umbrellas - were waiting Wednesday to be ferried out to "Camp 
Casey," the muddy staging area along Prairie Chapel Road where 
Sheehan and about 100 of her supporters were gathered.

    On a table in the living room were stacks of white T-shirts that read 
"BUSH 
 Talk to Cindy! Moms and Vets Will Stop the War!"

    In the tiny kitchen, two women busily chopped carrots and celery as 
they prepared to feed a growing cadre of activists. Other volunteers 
talked on their cellphones, coordinating with supporters around the 
country.

    There was much speculation about "other moms" and parents of 
troops serving in the war coming to join Sheehan, although no one 
seemed to know for certain. "A busload is coming from Seattle," one 
woman called out.

    Stephanie Frizzell, 30, said she drove from Dallas with her son, 
Julian, 4, "to provide support for Cindy." They met last weekend at a 
Dallas convention of veterans for peace.

    According to Ann Wright, who identified herself as a former U.S. 
diplomat who resigned to protest the war, Sheehan seemed to make a 
spontaneous decision to come to Crawford while she was addressing 
the convention Friday.

    Wright said many hands were raised, offering to join her mission.

    As Sheehan put it Wednesday: "I just had the right idea in the right 
place at the right time."

    ------

    Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein, Joel Havemann and 
Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this report.
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