Real patriots -- like the thin yellow line of heroes at the National Review Online -- have just about had it with the "mothers" of the "soldiers" in actual "combat." These dizzy dames are always complaining when we "kill" their "children." Can't they just shut their traps and get with the program?
Usually, the NRO focuses its hatred on Cindy Sheehan. (How dare she use her dead son to score political points for the argument that she wishes her son wasn't dead? Is she nuts? If she loved him so much, why'd she let him join the army in the first place? What kind of American is she? Doesn't she understand that patriotism is a con game? No, wait... let me start over. Uh... losers weepers.)
Smart moms don't let their children die for their country. You'd never catch Lucianne Goldberg making a bonehead mistake like that.
This week, the Washington Post printed an op-ed by a woman named Mary-Jo Cooney. Her son, a Marine, is being sent to Iraq and she'll miss him. She hopes he'll be okay, and wonders if people really understand how hard it is to see him go. You can read it here. It's not very long.
Or you can read Michael Ledeen's rebuttal on the NRO. It's called "It's All About Me." He calls her piece a "primal scream" -- it's not, but judge for yourself -- and sums it up:
"... In short, both she and her Marine are victims.
Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he's from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn't get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man.
Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world."
Ho-ho! "Not!" See, it's like Wayne's World! Why don't people use that "not" thing more! Oh, wait, because it's 1993! Not!
(Wait until 2024, when he makes his first Borat reference. It'll bring the beer hall down. "Stop whining, you Iran invasion war widows! It's sexy time!")
Now, usually you just ignore Michael Ledeen. (The difference between Michael Ledeen and an actual Blackshirt is that some of them were veterans.) But it seems kind of heartless to accuse a mother of narcissism for expressing concern about a child. It also seems like he doesn't know what the word narcissism means.
Maybe he never got the time to look the word up, because he spent his twenties defending the University of Wisconsin from the Viet Minh.
Maybe he's just as ass.
But it does make you wonder: Why can't liberals question the war -- it'll hurt the troops -- but conservatives can attack the soldiers' mothers?
And why do they find attacking the mothers so irresistibly delicious? It can't just be because it's taboo. It's got to be something deeper than that.
How else do you explain the Cindy Sheehan obsession?
Look at the number of references to Sheehan at the National Review Online, as compared to references to other anti-war figures and Bush critics:
Harry Belafonte 31Kayne West 34Ron Kovic 0Ed Asner 13Danny Glover 22Bruce Springsteen 49Martin Sheen 37Ramsey Clark 44
Cindy Sheehan 274
That's more than the other eight combined.
She also has at least a hundred more references than Frank Rich (121), Alec Baldwin (128), Noam Chomsky (128), or Ralph Nader (157).
Why? America has real enemies -- not just Frank Rich, but Osama Whatsisname -- but the NRO has dedicated itself to hunting down and destroying Cindy Sheehan. And, apparently, Mary Jo Cooney, too.
And the war goes on.
It's as if the shark kept eating people in "Jaws," but Chief Brody spent the movie digging up dirt on the lady in the black veil, the one who slapped him for letting it kill her son.