This post on Cindy Sheehan, Perfect Weapon, has given me nothing but heaps of shit from you all. Glad the folks at Kos have cleared things up:
But Jeff hits on something here, and raises a different type of possibility — a visible anti-war movement centered around a broad-based unassailable concern, a mother’s concern for her children.
But really- who am I to question the motives of those trumpeting the concerns of a grieving mother? She is, unassailable, you see. A perfect weapon, someone might say. Not that this has gone unnoticed by the Kossacks and others on the left before today:
We are making errors with references to Cindy Sheehan.
What are we trying to accomplish with promoting her? …
1. We should call her “Mother Sheehan”. We should never call her Cindy; I don’t know her. “Mother Sheehan” is her title, and expresses her ceremonial status as a bereaved mother, calling forth over the dead body of her son. She is not a person now, she is a mother, which is not an expression of her individuality, but rather the expression of her eternal character: the mother, the bringer of life who has been wronged by state power.
I know, I know. I hate America, I am part of the right-wing smear machine, I am heaping vitriol on the woman, you thought I was an ‘intellectually honest conservative,’ yadda yadda yadda.