Sheehan: The Company She Keeps

I had not planned to write again about Mrs. Sheehan, but two things have changed my mind. The first is that Second Breakfast is posting a statement, apparently just issued to KSFO radio, supposedly from Mrs. Sheehan’s own family. I’d be happier if SB’s link to KSFO included the text of the statement and could confirm it, so I am not posting the “statement” at this time.

I’m going to keep an eye on that, and see if the KFSO site confirms it.

UPDATE: Okay, it seems to be confirmed here and Drudge is all over it, so I don’t need to be. I would caution only that this statement is from the Mrs. Sheehan’s in-law’s side of the family. Since she and her husband are now parted, one has to bear that in mind.

The second reason I’m writing about Mrs. Sheehan is because this article from the NY Sun does raise the eyebrows about the company she is keeping, and only convinces me even more that her grief is being terribly exploited by the very people who support those who killed her son.

What she is doing still does not make sense, no matter how much the sob-sister violin players in the press would like to pretend that it does. (This is not the first time I’ve wondered what color the sky is in Margaret Carlson’s world.)

From the Sun:

Ms. Sheehan has been posting on Michael Moore’s Web site, writing, “We have such a strong coalition of groups. GSFP, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and the Crawford Peace House. I talked with John Conyers today and he wrote a letter to George signed by about 18 other Congress members to request that he meet with me. I also talked to Maxine Waters tonight and she is probably going to be here tomorrow.”

It turns out that the Crawford Peace House Web site includes a photo depicting the entire state of Israel as “Palestine,” and it carries a link to a report that when Prime Minister Sharon visited Crawford, the “peace house” greeted him with an “800-foot-long banner containing all of the United Nations resolutions that Israel is in violation of.” The Crawford Peace House site also features a photo of Eugene Bird, who has suggested that Israeli intelligence was responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA. UPJ organized the march during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, at which a New York Sun poll of 253 of the protesters found that fully 67% of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement “Iraqi attacks on American troops occupying Iraq are legitimate resistance.” In other words, Ms. Sheehan’s “coalition” includes a lot of people who think the persons who killed her son were justified.

United for Peace is nonetheless flogging Ms. Sheehan’s story in the run-up to its big weekend of “civil disobedience” and “direct action” next month in Washington. That protest is timed to coincide with the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, so that the people who were throwing rocks at Starbucks in Seattle to protest free trade back during the Clinton administration can now make common cause with the anti-war movement.
…
The whole crowd gains more from its association with Ms. Sheehan than she gains from her association with it.

My son Buster says he does not understand my concerns for Mrs. Sheehan, that she is being used and exploited. “Mom, she likes it,” he said last night. “When she met with the president the first time, she got into the papers with it – how many people meet him and parlay it into a news story? Now she’s in the papers again, people are paying attention to her, she has people petting her and telling her she is a hero. She loves this. She loves it more than she loves her husband, who separated from her because of what she is doing. She might be grieving, as you say, but she’s exploiting her own grief and allowing others to exploit her, too. It’s like an orgy.”

Ahem – Buster and I do not always agree, and I don’t even know where he gets the “orgy” simile, and he’s off launching himself at baseballs, just now, so I can’t ask him to clarify. I don’t know if Mrs. Sheehan is “loving” this. But I do know that the company she is keeping is dubious, relentless and interested in embracing something quite different than democracy.

Michelle Malkin has more, including lots of new links I hadn’t seen before, and a few examples of hate mail she has received which really make you wonder who the “haters” are.

Patterico tries (in vain, I am sure) to instruct the press as to what exactly is wrong with Mrs. Sheehan’s very extreme shift in accounts of her previous meeting with President Bush. I have to wonder why a President who met with her before, and has seen her account of it move from “presidential sympathy” to “presidential partying,” would have any interest in meeting with her again. I know that if I had treated someone well (and before witnesses, for goodness sake) and that person had then publically turned the meeting into a caricature of idiocy…I’d be hard pressed to want to want to give that person any more of my time.

Previous posts on Mrs. Sheehan: here and here.

Selwyn Duke has a rather rough piece wherein he worries about the eagerness of some to put “grieving activists” into congress and the senate. I can’t say he doesn’t have a point.

WELCOME: Michelle Malkin readers! While you are here, please look around. Today we’re also talking about Cake and the Divine Spark, the idea that maybe Sandy Berger’s Pants hold the key to a mystery, Attorney General Eliot Spitzers seeming reluctance to talk to Air America, and a new book that takes on the Myth of Hitler’s Pope.