Guys (and Gals!) keep dying, W. keeps smilin’, and the Moms keep comin’ (to Crawford).

The (p)resident took off yesterday (Monday) to Mormon country where they like everything he says. He tried, along with his quislings in the media, to liken the struggle in Iraq to more heroic efforts of American history.

Good luck.

In the Sunday “New York Times” our good friend Frank Rich talked about our not-so-good friend “The Bubble Boy,” which the media has taken to calling Bush with searing effectiveness. The piece can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21rich.html?incamp=article_popular&pagewanted=print

In his “The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan,” Rich noted that when disasters in Iraq occur, “the administration punts. But when they happen at home, there’s a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began.”

“Swift Boating” refers to the sliming the administration resorts to when people exercise their constitutional right to question the direction those who govern us are leading the country. The original Swift Boating was done to John Kerry.

You all remember that.

The Democrats went out and got a war hero with medals and scars and all in anticipation of (r)epublican claims of softness on defense and national security. They figured that was it, that the senator had a record that spoke for itself and deserved the respect (r)epublicans are always claiming to feel for “our troops.”

Of course, that was nonsense. These people have no shame and so they went out and got some disgruntled Vietnam “Swift Boat” vets, plied them with zillions of dollars, and plopped them on Bill O’Reilly’s show where they took aim and fired.

Kerry, a decent human being, never recovered from the shock (except in three consecutive debates in which he revealed the emperor for the naked boob he is).

Rich points out that John McCain had come in for similar treatment earlier on as had former Georgia Senator Max Cleland who lost a few limbs over there, but still didn’t meet the (r)epublican criteria for patriot.

“True to form,” Rich writes, “the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a ‘crackpot’ by Fred Barnes.” That was the spark that soon led to a firestorm across the right-wing blogosphere.

Rich is a journalist and a gentleman, a throwback to an earlier day when objectivity and truth were tightly affixed to one another and Americans could expect a degree of verisimilitude in what was reported to them.

Some papers have gents and others have jerks, like “The San Diego Union-Tribune”, which provides income and succor to a sucka named Robert J. Caldwell, who wrote a piece of drivel along the lines described by Rich called “Sheehan: From pathos to nonsense”:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050821/news_mz1e21cald.html

Here he is: “To state the obligatory caveat first, Cindy Sheehan deserves the respect and sympathy that attend losing a son who died bravely in the service of his country. The pain and grief she feels over the death in combat last year of Army Specialist Casey Sheehan warrants the sympathy of all Americans, whatever their views on the Iraq war.”

Nothing more (r)epublican, more (k)arl (r)ovian, than that. You see, the respect and sympathy are “obligatory.” It’s Caldwell’s “obligation” to recognize why Cindy Sheehan’s crusade possesses the moral authority it does for millions of Americans before he begins savaging her.

Caldwell says Sheehan’s views on the war range from, “the incoherent to the just plain nutty.”

And this is what Rich is talking about. There was a time in this democracy when everyone was free to possess the opinion that possessed them. Now it’s got to be what the folks at Fox News think flows mainstream (god help us).

“She says,” the hit piece goes on, “that the Iraq war is an evil conspiracy deliberately concocted and waged on behalf of Israel; an assertion that has endeared her to such neo-Nazi kooks as David Duke. She also says that Bush launched the Iraq war to ‘make his buddies rich, that it was about oil’.”

Well, that David Duke, a one-time (r)epublican aspirant, should be endeared to Sheehan over her sense that Israel’s interests were taken into account in the lead-up to the war doesn’t make everyone else who sees a filigree of truth in this position a neo-Nazi. Saddam once launched missiles at Israel whose regional interests in Iraq are painfully clear (to those who choose to see).

the scribe suspects that neo-Nazis the world over are pleased as punch with Bush’s blatant marriage of corporate welfare to state militarism, and that must make Caldwell a Nazi, too, which of course it doesn’t.

Was it about oil? Your guess is as good as mine since our government regularly meets in secret and withholds documents properly requested by members of the congressional opposition.

Whether it is or not, the scribe would say this position is no less “incoherent or plain nutty” than the original premise for the war was: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was cooking up a “mushroom cloud” for Ohio instead of writing romance novels in a delusional haze.

Nope. That was perfectly alright and coherent. Why?

Because the (p)resident and his supporters, who have the advantage of celestial guidance over the rest of us scientific seculars, SAID SO!

Bullshit.

Anyway, as Rich points out the “Swift Boating” didn’t work this time. “This summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush’s motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war’s critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But his White house no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.”

Amen.

And for those of you that have digested your most recent meal, here are some images of George Bush's democracy crusade in Iraq.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/23/iraq_gallery/index1.html