California Yankee has been a Cindy Sheehan free zone. I have chosen not to post about what I consider to be Sheehan's descent into the depths of the loony left out of respect for her grief over the loss of her son. There is no way I can truly understand her feelings. But as the media has embraced her and continuously provides a vehicle for her message of hate for President Bush, I can't take it anymore. I haven't been able to write the words that adequately describe my feelings about Sheehan's hateful message. Thankfully others have.
In his column in today's Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn writes what should be required reading about Sheehan and the lunacy that has embraced her:
The more Cindy Sheehan is heard the more obvious it is she's thrown her lot in with kooks most Americans would give a wide berth to.
Don't take my word for it, ask her family. Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins put out the following statement:
"The Sheehan Family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq War and we have been silently, respectfully grieving. We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son's good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect."
Read all of Steyn' column. Steyn notes that Casey's father, Pat Sheehan, filed for divorce from Cindy and the New York Times explained that although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalized. Steyn finds a lesson for Democrats in the Times' explanation of the Sheehan's divorce. There are a lot of less liberal and less radicalized Democrats out there, but you don't hear them. No unfortunately those less liberal and less radicalized Democrats have allowed their voices to be drowned out by the Cindy Sheehans and the looney left.
UPDATE: Boston Globe Columnist, Cathy Young, writes about "The Cindy Sheehan you don't know:"
IT IS ENORMOUSLY difficult to say anything critical about Cindy Sheehan, the Everymom of the antiwar movement, without sounding indecently callous. She is, after all, a woman who has lost her child -- one of humankind's most universal images of grief.
[. . .]
I respect Sheehan's pain, no doubt compounded by her mother's stroke last week. Yet Sheehan is not simply expressing her pain and rage, privately or even publicly; when she turns her grief into a political cause, her politics cannot remain off-limits.
Sheehan's first and foremost demand is that all American troops be brought home from Iraq immediately. On this scale, irrationality becomes dangerous. Even many of those who opposed the war in Iraq from the start are convinced that a quick pullout would be a disaster -- both for the Iraqis, and for all those who would suffer if Iraq became a fully operational terrorist base. Who will have to give account to the bereaved men and women whose loved ones will be killed as a result?
But there's more than that to Sheehan's politics. She is not simply against the war in Iraq (and, as she told talk show host Chris Matthews on CNBC, against the war in Afghanistan as well). She has thrown in her lot with the hardcore Michael Moore left, and this less savory aspect of her crusade has been largely ignored by the respectful media.
In her public appearances, Sheehan has not only called Bush ''the biggest terrorist in the world" but suggested that his ''band of neocons" deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to happen: ''9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through," she told a cheering crowd at San Francisco State University last April.
That crowd, by the way, was holding a rally in support of Lynne Stewart, a radical New York attorney convicted in 2003 of aiding and abetting a terrorist conspiracy.
There's more, read the whole thing.
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