Assailable

Today's Strib editorial is a particularly ripe specimen.

It cites the likes of Cindy Sheehan and Becky Lourey as the new face of the antiwar movement.

Thirty-five years ago, the antiwar movement was typified by a long-haired, scruffy young male of draftable age, burning his draft card.

A new antiwar movement is being born this summer on a Texas roadside. It presents a much different face -- feminine, older, wiser, and filled with grief and righteous indignation. The face is that of mothers who lost sons and daughters in Iraq, first Cindy Sheehan of California, and now more, including Minnesota state Sen. Becky Lourey.

I presume this means no more six-foot-tall Rumsfeld puppets?

The editorial continues:

The moral authority of the blossoming movement's face is undeniable and, despite concerted conservative efforts to discredit it, unassailable. Even those who disagree with the antiwar encampment's contention that the war in Iraq is delivering none of its promised gains for this country are obliged to concede that Sheehan and other Gold Star mothers have the right to express their sorrow and anger as they see fit.

The First Amendment does indeed guarantee them the right to free speech...

...but let's back up and talk about moral assailability.

As a force for setting national policy? A mother's grief is most definitely assailable. Personal emotion is a lousy driver for policy, no matter whose emotion or what the issue.

The Strib - like a lot of the left - confuses the right's unwillingness (for the most part) to insult Cindy Sheehan's grief or attack her right to speech with wariness about the rectitude of her cause, and its applicability to the larger war.

Make no mistake about it - when it comes to setting policy in the War On Terror, Sheehan and Lourey are dead wrong.

To these mothers' credit, they see fit to grieve in silence no longer. Their witness is that stubborn adherence to a failed policy is not patriotism, and that the sacrifice of fallen sons and daughters is not dishonored by an admission that their assignment was flawed, and needs revision.

Lourey, who spent three days at the protest site dubbed Camp Casey outside President Bush's ranch, offers the antiwar movement a powerful voice -- one capable of attracting national attention if this summer's grass-roots combustion in Crawford catches lasting fire.

Which, it would seem, it's not; last week's Rasmussen Poll showed Sheehan isn't going over well at all outside the Blue Counties, and poorly as well among military families.

Who, apparently, aren't regarded as morally unassailable.

Both personally and politically, the DFL state senator from Kerrick commands respect. Lourey, 62, is an indefatigable 15-year legislator admired for her warmth, passion and lawmaking skill. She and her husband raised 12 children, eight of them adopted, while establishing a successful family business. She is as riveting a speaker as exists in Minnesota's liberal camp.

Lourey fell silent in the weeks after her Army pilot son Matt was shot down and killed near Baghdad in June. Her grief's quiet phase appears to have ended. We expect that she now has much to say that, in coming weeks, Americans should hear.

Possible - and, unlike the mass of military parents who support the President and his policy, Senator Loury can be assured of constant, uncritical, fawning coverage in the mainstream media, especially the Strib.

The Strib will, by the way, give itself a hernia, straining as hard as it does to find a Vietnam parallel:

The Minnesota contingent at Camp Casey also included DFL Second District congressional candidate Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent and whistleblower on the agency's inept handling of tips about the terror plot that became 9/11. Rowley's participation drew out U.S. Rep. John Kline, the Second District incumbent whom Rowley is challenging.

Kline faulted Lourey, Rowley and other war protesters. Their action "is harmful to the morale of the soldiers, and it encourages the enemy," he said on a visit to the Star Tribune.

To Americans past a certain age, the accusation is familiar. It echoes the rhetoric that hawks used to try to stifle the antiwar movement that burgeoned during the Vietnam War, especially after the Tet offensive in 1968, when Americans came together in large numbers to change this nation's policy in Southeast Asia.

Of course, the hawks were right; the Tet Offensive was a military victory (the Viet Cong was not capable of operating in the field for the rest of the war; the "Guerrillas" in the South for the next five years were mostly North Vietnamese regulars in civilian clothes. Hey, there's an Iraq parallel!) - but the left succeeded in selling it to the media (personified by Walter Cronkite) as a defeat; that perception was all that crossed the threshold of the US news media.

Just like today. Or, to paraphrase the Strib, "to American conservatives and people with the faintest knowledge of history and the cynical, selective memory of the media, the accusation is familiar".

Suggesting that protesters have insufficient concern for American troops was an easy charge to level against draft-dodging youth, and it probably is to be expected as congressional campaign season gets underway. But it does not ring true when aimed at parents who raised children so patriotic that they volunteered for military service.

But, like the fly-infested, sandal-shod protesters of the Strib editors' youth, the parents' grief is being used by forces larger, more subtle, and less telegenic; the likes of Michael Moore, MoveOn, Code Pink, ANSWER and the radical left that is slowly squatting in the DNC building.

Such parents understand what support for those sons and daughters requires. They know that it does not require blind loyalty to bad policy.

But what if the loyalty isn't blind?

Has the Strib considered the possibility that it's not?

Dumb question, right?

Posted by Mitch at August 24, 2005 05:32 PM | TrackBack