Tuesday, August 30, 2005
CATTLE BEG FOR LIVES
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi visits Mother Sheehan:
Crawford, the home of President George W. Bush, is a sun-scorched hole of a backwater Texas town—a single dreary railroad crossing surrounded on all sides by roasted earth the color of dried dog shit. There are scattered clumps of trees and brush, but all the foliage seems bent from the sun’s rays and ready at any moment to burst into flames.
Way to dump on the environment, dude! Taibbi lives in New York, amongst fellow caring liberals. Although his empathy seems to evaporate once he’s in Crawford:
The moaning cattle along the lonely roads sound like they’re begging for their lives. The downtown streets are empty. Just as the earth is home to natural bridges, this place is a natural dead end—the perfect place to drink a bottle of Lysol, wind up in a bad marriage, have your neck ripped out by a vulture.
Nobody has ever consumed Lysol in NYC. No bad marriages, either. Vulture attacks? Well, bring them on, if they’ll stop Taibbi’s Cindy coverage:
Sheehan’s demand was that Bush meet with her and explain to her what, exactly, her son had died for. The demand, and the accompanying solitary vigil, began as a simple, powerful, unequivocal political statement—the unarguably genuine protest of a single grieving individual. It was a quest that began on a moral territory almost beyond argument: How could anyone quibble with a mother who’d lost her son?
We’re back in Maureen Dowd’s world of absolute moral authority.
But Sheehan quickly became more than just the Next Big Media Thing, a successor to Kobe, Laci and Michael.
No, she pretty much remained the Next Big Media Thing. Despite his loathing of the war (“Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents”), Taibbi can’t deny the lunacy of Sheehan’s anti-Bush comrades:
The movement likes to think of itself as open and inclusive, but in practice it often comes off like a bunch of nerds whose favored recreation is coming up with clever passwords for their secret treehouse. The ostensible political purpose may be ending the war, but the immediate occupation for a sizable percentage of these people always seemed to be a kind of rolling adult tourist attraction called Hating George Bush ...
At one point at Camp Casey, an informal poll taken around a campfire revealed that six out of a group of ten protesters, selected at random, believed that the United States government was directly involved in planning the 9/11 bombings. Flabbergasted, I tried to press the issue.
"Do you know how many people would have to be involved in that conspiracy?” I said. “I mean, start with the pilots . . ."
"The planes were flown by remote control,” a girl sitting across from me snapped.
Comments Noir: “Crawford is to moonbats as Iraq is to terrorists.”