Why Conservative Intellectual Chicken-Hawks Can't Stand the Likes of Cindy Sheehan

Chris Kelly's recent post asks a great question: why are Michael Ledeen and the National Review Online so obsessed with Cindy Sheehan that they trash her much more often than they do Harry Belafonte and Noam Chomsky and Frank Rich and other famous critics of US policy in Iraq?

The occasion for Kelly's question is Ledeen's piece about a Washington Post op-ed by an everyday mom named Mary-Jo Cooney. In it, she has the audacity to describe her feelings watching her son go off to war in Iraq. The gist of Ledeen's gripe is this: Cooney is saying it's all about me, narcissism run amok, etc.

Here's the reason for his intense resentment. Conservative intellectuals of this kind don't believe in democracy in the sense that they don't believe that ordinary people are as important as they themselves are. They wouldn't put it that way, but that is how they feel. They pine for the old days when anonymous masses were voiceless, when they responded like conditioned pigeons to simplistic stimuli and went off to die at the behest of their betters, who really understood what was at stake in the world.

For these conservative intellectual chicken-hawks (chicken-hawks is an important phrase because, in the old days, the elite went out and fought and died as well) -- for these chicken-hawks, the fact that Cindy and Mary-Jo get to express themselves on major media platforms is just more evidence of the decadence of our culture. For them, allowing the suffering of ordinary people to matter in this situation amounts to putting Oprah in charge of our public discourse.

That's how they see it.