SHEEHAN--SHE OUT--SHE GONE!



Who, today, remembers the apogee of Cindy Sheehan–or, for that matter, remembers her at all? No, gentle readers, we have not resorted to annoying you with pop quizzes. Herewith, our first in a series of tributes to legendary ladies of the political Left, presented this time around with the following mnemonic stimulus: Cindy Sheehan occupied the screens of cable newscasts earlier this century as omnipresently as does, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today. After her son Casey was killed in action in Iraq, Sheehan determined to honor his memory by becoming an anti-war activist. She gained immediate fame, mainly for camping out in proximity to wherever George W. Bush happened to be at any given time while reciting increasingly shrill anti-war shibboleths to reporters who clustered about her like flies on a sugar cube. But Sheehan’s sugar cube may have been akin to the variety hippies once called “electric.” Evidence of her divorcement from reality grew in tandem with her media exposure. Her early protests, voiced as reasoned, rationally expressed arguments against the war, quickly deteriorated into radical diatribes, and the more attention these garnered, the more Sheehan’s bombast degenerated.

D espite a pleasant and mutually respectful meeting with President Bush, Sheehan soon began second-guessing the matter, envisioning a rematch in which she promised to overwhelm Bush, challenging him to “tell me, what the noble cause is that my son died for. And if he even starts to say freedom and democracy, I’m gonna say, bullsh*t. You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich…. You tell me that, you don’t tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.” Wisely, “W” resisted issuing Cindy a second invitation. Unruffled, she moved on to tax resistance, a form of virtue signaling so rare among liberals that a cynic might have inferred a hint of niggardliness. According to Sheehan, though, her mounting IRS debt symbolized her resolve to end the war. “I feel like I gave my son to this country in an illegal and immoral war,” she told reporters, “And, so, if they can give me my son back, then I’ll pay my taxes.” But the IRS (which remained unresponsive regarding Sheehan’s proposed swap) was not alone in demanding a cut of her stash. Her husband, Patrick, filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences” including differences over Cindy’s decision to cut him out of the government payments disbursed to the family following their son’s death in battle.

The Peace Mom, ascending…

Dubbed “the Peace Mom” by applausive cable-news prattlers, and named “The Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement” by Lennox Yearwood, Jr. (about whom the less said the better), Sheehan founded Gold Star Families for Peace, which in turn funded TV commercials–which in turn featured Sheehan. On Hardball she exchanged flummeries with Chris Matthews. On NPR she was praised in hushed, pseudo-Brythonic tones. John McCain, never one to give forethought precedence over impulse, invited her into his office for a heart-to-heart, after which “the Peace Mom” denounced McCain as “a warmonger.” Urged to expatiate, she added that President Bush was “the biggest terrorist in the world, worse than Osama Bin Laden,” and declared she would prefer living under Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez—but instead of renouncing her citizenship, she moved to Berkeley, California…we will forego the obvious remarks.

Arrogance abroad….

Sheehan did, in fact, take her act abroad. In the grand tradition of useful idiot-ism, she visited Caracas and paid her respects to Hugo Chavez, thanking him for “supporting life and peace.” By way of underscoring this support, Chavez put his arm around Sheehan and exhorted activists worldwide to “help bring down the U.S. empire.” Following a private one-on-one with the chubby despot, Cindy revealed Chavez had advised her to run for president in the U.S. “I was impressed with his sincerity,”she added.

Next, Cindy showed up in London, where she was lauded (in authentically Brythonic tones) by BBC newsreaders, after which she addressed something called the International Peace Conference–a Labourite event that generated no appreciable effects on peace anywhere. From there she was whisked off by chauffeured limousine to attend a performance of “Peace Mom,” a hagiographic stage play about Sheehan, penned by Nobel Laureate Dario Fo (we never heard of him either). Cindy gave “Peace Mom” a rave review, and then hopped a flight across the Irish Sea, stopping at Shannon Airport long enough to harangue Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern (who was kind enough to greet her upon landing). “Your government,” she told Ahern, “even though they didn’t send troops to Iraq, are complicit in the crimes by allowing the planes to land and refuel.” Ahern’s response is lost to history, although Ireland’s criminal complicity continued unabated. Returning home, Sheehan produced not one, but two books (in what seemed preternaturally short order), reprised her D.C. arrest by tying herself to the White House fence, and proceeded, upon release, to the Capitol Building where she was arrested a third time (but for the first time by the Capital Police) for attempting to crash the state-of-the-union address.

So, what happened to Cindy Sheehan? How did her widely heralded crusade for world peace evanesce into a memory so dim, it requires WOOF to revivify it in this premier entry of our exiting new Lionesses of the Left series? Explanations are not readily forthcoming, or rather, those available are mainly inadequate, inaccurate, or sophistic in the extreme. For instance, displaying that magnitude of subliminally-driven avoidance that invariably afflicts the liberal press whenever accurately describing the facts would betray its own accountability, USA Today reported that Sheehan vanished from the scene because “Instead of focusing on issues where an increasing number of Americans agree with her, she disappeared into fringe politics.” But that, dear readers, is abject hooey–and an example of media twistedness we’ll revisit in the conclusion of this article. Suffice it for now that Sheehan immersed herself in fringe politics almost from the beginning and rose to media stardom by raging against the values and sensibilities of “an increasing number of Americans.” It was only once she radicalized her gabble that the media made her a star. Why these same forces ultimately cast her aside will never be detailed in the pages of USA Today, or by any other establishment rag. That, gentle readers, is why our rag is here.

A somewhat retiring figure….

W hile Sheehan played no conscious role in her downfall, she hastened it unwittingly through a series of markedly imprudent miscalculations. Prey to that form of impulsivity that is particularly ill-suited to chess and politics, she repeatedly followed her instincts, which repeatedly betrayed her, and for reasons she grasped too late in the game. The first instance came as the dazzlingly acclamatory publicity surrounding her early efforts took a modest downturn–a clearly cyclical diminishment any media-savvy analyst might have predicted. Sheehan, however, reacted to the dip in coverage like an addict in the throes of withdrawal. Persuaded that only drastic action could avert her movement’s demise, (and restore her flagging notoriety) she cast about for an attention grabber–something different and newsworthy enough to generate fresh headlines. Drawing on a staple of the entertainment industry, she unleashed the manipulative power of feigned retirement.

Coming out….

To officialize the event in an authoritative venue, Cindy turned to no less a medium of record than the Daily Kos, informing its readers of her resignation as the “face of the American antiwar movement,” in order, she said, to resume domestic life and devote herself to mothering her “surviving children.” This created the desired shock wave, all right, but once that wave swept the establishment’s news crawls, attention once again withered. After a news cycle spent spotlighting the “Peace Mom’s” ostentatious withdrawal from active activism, the ever-myopic media leviathan lumbered onward, quickly forgetful of the Cindy Sheehan story. So the retirement ploy was a bust, but reversing it presented a challenge. Sinatra, Streisand—even Eminem and Alec Baldwin, enjoyed the option of ascribing their returns to popular demand—but Sheehan wasn’t dealt that card; the masses seemed content to stumble along without her guidance. Absent anything resembling popular outcry, Sheehan intuited (and not un-incisively) that some irresistible provocation was needed to legitimate her reappearance. Some colossal affront—preferably emanating from the Bush administration–a perversion of justice or some militaristic aggression so vile–so fascistic–so arrogant–as to impel the Peace Mom’s return to public life. But if Cindy’s tactical calculations seemed uncharacteristically workable, her patience proved unequal to the task.

The Scooter Infamy

One cannot play the mythic hero absent an equivalently epic challenge. Every Beowulf needs a Grendel, every Cú Cuchulain a Lugaid. In this instance, however, Cindy Sheehan was in too great a hurry to wait around for the ideal nemesis to pop up–and the best she could produce on short notice was the hapless Scooter Libby. Libby, it may (or may not) be remembered, was an official in the Bush White House whose misfortune it was to be Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff during the media-confected Valerie Plame scandal. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (an earlier avatar of Robert Mueller) was charged with tracking down whichever un-American rapscallion leaked Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation (an affiliation known even to her neighbors, and announced by her husband at every upscale Georgetown dinner event) to the press.

After spending part of 2004 and most of 2005 feeding “evidence” to his grand jury, throwing reporters in jail for refusing to testify, and pretending he didn’t know all along that Richard L. Armitage was the inadvertent leaker, or that Plame’s CIA work was non-clandestine, Fitzgerald caught Libby in a perjury trap–albeit one so feeble it required sending Libby to prison for failing to remember details that Fitzgerald psychically divined Libby did, in fact, remember, and therefore must have lied about forgetting. Ignoring the probation office’s recommendation that Libby receive home confinement, the prosecution insisted on prison where Libby languished until Bush finally got around to commuting his sentence. (Just recently, Donald Trump fully pardoned him.)

Treachery, left and right!

But according to Cindy Sheehan, Bush’s pusillanimous commutation of Libby’s sentence was tantamount to treason, and treason so vile as to necessitate the Peace Mom’s return to the public arena, there to rejoin the battle against the resurgent forces of tyranny. Announcing her return to reporters already struggling to recall her previous exploits, Sheehan fiercely defended her decision, announcing “I believe that when George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence for a crime that he was complicit in, he committed treason.” Noting, perhaps, that even the most leftward among the assembled newshounds appeared baffled, Cindy drove her point home, explaining, “a president can commute sentences, a president can pardon people, but not when they are involved in the crime.” Feet shuffled–throats cleared–Cindy pressed on: “I believe that Nancy Pelosi committed treason when she took impeachment off the table! You cannot ignore our constitution. And not only that, they have also been going against the constitution by approving torture, which goes against the Eighth Amendment, by approving spying on us without warrants, which goes against the Fourth Amendment….” and so on.

Like in Venezuela!

Support was meager from the outset. Political backing came chiefly from the infamously addlepated Cynthia McKinney who exited congress to seek the Green Party’s presidential nomination, and failing that, appeared with Sheehan at a San Francisco demonstration, bellowing, “We have an opportunity to learn from countries where people power has stepped up and through the power of the ballot they have changed things, like in Venezuela…”

Hugo goes soft on the Evil Empire….

But even Venezuela was adjusting its rhetoric, sensitive to the imminent departure of “W” and the nearly inevitable ascension of Barack Hussein Obama. In the event, it bears noting, Chavez (who claimed to smell brimstone whenever Bush was in the vicinity) greeted the Bamster with a fraternal embrace and handed him a copy of “The Open Veins of Latin America” a gongoristic denunciation of U.S. imperialism by the Uruguayan communist Eduardo Galeano. Obama, whose Marxist roots were primarily African, didn’t recognize it. “I thought it was one of Chavez’s books,” he told reporters, “I was going to give him one of mine.” Vintage Bamster, right? But The New Yorker called it “a quip,” and one of the many “good lines” Obama “got in” during his hug fest with the Venezuelan despot. Point being: nobody was saying anything critical of America’s first Marxist in those early days, except for a handful of contemptible fringe figures–Rush Limbaugh, and his Neanderthal ilk. Cindy Sheehan, however, didn’t get the memo. A flaw peculiar to clinical narcissists is a level of self-absorption that inures them at times to even those rudimentary tactical insights accessible to the average schoolyard bully (like Hugo Chavez, come to think of it). Hitler invaded Russia. Commodus thought he could outfight champion gladiators in the Colosseum. And Cindy Sheehan decided to attack everyone at once.

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Cindy unhinged!

In fairness, the timing of Sheehan’s re-entry made success well nigh impossible. Obama was headed for the Oval Office cheered on by a homogeneously rhapsodic media. The country was headed at full throttle for socialized medicine, government takeovers of car companies and banks, absurdly delusive bailouts, and a record-breaking eight-year economic slump. On these accounts, liberals were as close to contentedness as liberals ever get. It was the wrong time to play Peace Mom. Obama was the Peace President, for Heaven’s sake–lowering the tides, and engineering terrorist takeovers in Africa and the Middle East denominated “Arab Spring” by the media. Networks formerly committed to dolefully tallying the death tolls of American soldiers dropped the subject entirely. Investigative journalists once frantic to expose evidence of tortured prisoners, civilian massacres, and blood-for-oil conspiracies, all held to be cardinal features of America’s military operations under Bush, waxed suddenly incurious. Given the establishment’s newfound insouciance to foreign conflicts–indeed, its reluctance to even contemplate the existence of such conflicts, Sheehan might have anticipated a lukewarm reunion with the Left. Instead, she bounded to the microphones expecting levels of support identical to those she’d enjoyed previously–and grew sullen in their absence.

Even before Obama set foot in the White House, Cindy Sheehan pronounced herself disillusioned with a number of Democratic luminaries–a point she emphasized by running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. Fuming over the Speaker’s failure to impeach Bush or end the war, Sheehan campaigned on a platform comprising single-payer government health care, re-imposition of the fairness doctrine, withdrawal from all free-trade agreements, repeal of the Patriot Act, government funding to develop”renewable energy,” nationalization of oil and electricity, legalization of pot and same-sex marriage, reversal of all deregulation, and the closing of Guantanamo. If anything, Sheehan was a radical visionary–her efforts should have wooed leftists en masse, but the Left never marches without its media, and the media were in an Obama-induced sugar coma. In this political climate, taking on Pelosi was a major blunder. Sheehan’s reliable soapbox at the Daily Kos was unceremoniously yanked–she was banned even from commenting. National news outlets ignored her candidacy. Local journalists condescended snarkily. Despite such setbacks, Sheehan finished second to Pelosi in a seven-way race, garnering 16.14% of the vote. It was, after all, San Francisco. But the establishment was fed up.

Shock and dismay!

A ntisemitic remarks Sheehan included in emails back in 2005 (which concerned no one in media at the time and would barely inspire a raised eyebrow from today’s Democratic leadership) were suddenly resurrected and reviewed by scowling TV anchors simulating shock and dismay. Slate reported the matter in detailed, studiedly umbrageous prose. Such shots across the bow might have persuaded a less determined–or more perceptive– activist to alter course, but Cindy, who was by then advertising herself as a “revolutionary socialist,” doubled down. With mind-boggling tone deafness, she raced to Martha’s Vineyard, intent on disrupting President Obama’s vacation exactly as she had Bush’s. Collecting what press she could muster, she praised Ted Kennedy as a true antiwar Democrat, contrasting him to Obama, whom Sheehan branded “another able servant of the 1 percent.” The media were in equal degrees shocked, repulsed, and mute. To the extent Sheehan’s escapades were covered at all, the coverage was condescendingly negative. The Peace Mom grew increasingly bellicose. Even Britain’s reliably “wet” newspaper, The Guardian, joined Cindy’s critics with a decidedly choleric opinion piece disparaging “The Epic Narcissism of Cindy Sheehan.” Lambasting their target as “a self-styled sanctimonious didact,” (we rather like that) and “a woman whose desperate drive for self-publicity extended to stretching out on her son’s grave for a glossy Vanity Fair photoshoot,” The Guardian concluded that, “Even the American left’s netroots are getting tired of Cindy Sheehan,” which rang true, apart from the inapt choice of adverbial phrasing. Stated more accurately, only the American left could tire of Cindy Sheehan, because only the American left found her captivating in the first place; and the American left was no longer prepared to coddle “the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement,” because she was now making trouble on the wrong damn bus.

Shun the unbeliever!

Cindy was always deaf to her critics, but now her deafness came with a price. She pursued the unthinkable, continuously tearing into Barack Obama, even flying to Oslo, Norway, to protest his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. But the press–even the Norwegian press–ignored her. Returning to “the evil empire,” as she’d taken to calling her own country, she effectively eliminated any hope of recapturing a modicum of media attention by resorting to the one commodity socialists and progressives learned long ago to avoid. She began telling the truth; citing facts the liberal media had unanimously contrived to suppress. For starters, she pointed out that a war still raged in the Middle East, and Americans were still fighting it. Worse, she correctly described Obama as “a Democratic president who is actually bombing more countries than Bush did.” The few remaining media stringers monitoring Sheehan’s events were hastily withdrawn, or ran for cover of their own accord. Nobody was supposed to say that stuff. The networks wouldn’t touch it. Shun the unbeliever, they muttered, meanwhile distracting viewers with giddy coverage of Barack and Biden ordering burgers at McDonald’s like any other pair of regular, everyday guys (an image Obama marred slightly by asking for Dijon mustard), conducting informed discussions of the myriad health benefits certain to result from the First Lady’s efforts to render school lunches inedible, and by programming interviews with top journalists, like the author of Ebony Magazine’s think piece, “What makes Barack Cool.”

Sanctimony and slapstick…

Never one to overthink matters prior to execution, Cindy undertook her next bid for attention: She announced her candidacy for the vice presidency, running on the “Peace and Freedom” ticket with running mate, Roseanne Barr. Barr had sought but failed to gain the Green Party nomination but readily teamed with Sheehan, whose platform, according to the Peace and Freedom website, included “Revolutionary Socialism as the solution to the Imperialist/Capitalist two-party stranglehold on not only US politics, but, by extension, the world.” Oddly, it seems to have eluded Sheehan that her running mate was a comedian. Barr’s over-the-top rhetoric, bizarre outbursts, and impromptu “nativist” rants, together with the increasingly obvious fact that her campaign was mainly intended to generate a documentary (“Roseanne for President!” hit theaters in 2015), caught Sheehan entirely off guard. Fatuous sanctimony and giddy slapstick make poor bedfellows. Stunned by her running mate’s lack of gravitas, Sheehan quit the ticket, ignoring her campaign’s insistence that it was too late to register a substitute. Later, reflecting on the debacle, Sheehan perspicaciously opined, “I don’t think [Barr’s] run…was very serious. It was weird.”

As if stung by the incumbent’s victory over the Peace and Freedom Party (not to mention Mitt Romney) Cindy redoubled her attacks on Obama, adding hefty measures of nonsense to the mix. She laughed off the killing of Osama bin Laden, declaring it “a hoax,” and denounced Obamacare as a scheme to enrich the very “fat-cat insurance corporations” it was actually designed to scapegoat and destroy. Next, she assurred some niche interviewer that Obama was “a bigger war criminal than even Bush,” but immediately rescinded the charge, admitting she couldn’t really decide. But even as her ventures into truth-telling doomed her best points to liberal oblivion, her crazier outbursts rendered her an object of unanimous ridicule. Reduced to posting on her own website, the Peace Mom summed up her anti-Obama crusade and resultant martyrdom, insisting: “I have never stopped protesting the US’s wars since Obama assumed command of the Evil Empire. I have been arrested a few times right in front of his White House protesting his war. I have been manhandled by the police; dumped in a cold cell with no food for 53 hours once; received a stay-away order from the perimeter of the White House that came with a six-month jail stay if I violated it and the Justice Department sent three US Attorneys from DC to Sacramento to persecute me for being a war-tax refuser.” But nobody–not even Cynthia McKinney–bothered to commiserate.

Forgotten but not gone….

The problem with being declared a non-person by the liberal media is, nobody notices you’re missing–at least nobody that makes any difference to the establishment. It fell to the likes of (a contributor to an anti-war blog cannily entitled THE ANTI-WAR BLOG) to ask “Where’s the Coverage of Cindy Sheehan?” Ditz (WOOF did not make that name up) seemed genuinely mystified by Sheehan’s eclipse, but even Ditz’s readership needed some mnemonic jostling. “Remember her?” Ditz rhetorized, “She’s back, or really she never left, but you might not have heard anything about her in awhile. And you might not be hearing about her now, unless you’re reading sites like ours …at least that’s the impression you’d get watching the cable news… Cindy isn’t going away though, and she’ll be shadowing the president’s vacation just as she did with the last one. The only question is, will anyone cover it?” And the answer, of course, was a resounding ‘no!‘ Sheehan wasn’t going away, but she had become the very embodiment of the snarky inversion, “forgotten, but not gone.”

What really happened?

In 2013, Elspeth Reeves trenchantly (for Elspeth Reeves) observed in The Atlantic, that “Every once in a while an American citizen is plucked from obscurity and held up as the perfect embodiment of the political moment. These citizens are used as props by politicians, made into household names, and then, when the moment passes, are promptly discarded. But a small hitch in this noble tradition is that the newly-semi-famous citizens do not let go of their fame just because they are no longer useful.” An excellent appraisal, but Miss Reeves breaks bad when she conjures the shade of Cindy Sheehan. “Where is she now?” Reeves asks, only to conclude, “Fame did not suit her.” But that’s blatant nonsense. Fame not only suited Cindy Sheehan–it fitted her tighter than an “ARREST CHENEY” t-shirt. Reeves really means that Sheehan no longer suited the approved template. But she misses her own point, insisting that “Sheehan slowly squandered the mainstream respectability she had early in her protest years.” Mainstream respectability? How bourgeois.

If Sheehan embodied mainstream respectability at any point during her career, John Kerry would have beaten Bush in a landslide, and the Affordable Care Act would have swept through congress by tumult (as opposed to being “deemed to have passed” despite a disapproval rating even CNN placed at 59 percent). But we abjure readers from supposing Miss Reeves deliberately Orwellian. Not a bit of it. She wrote “mainstream” in all sincerity, where any rational analyst would write “far Left.” because the establishment believes itself the embodiment of the mainstream, just as it misidentifies the actual mainstream as “fringe.” The establishment never (really) eats at McDonalds–never gets on a bus–never tours the back roads of the Midwest, stays in a motel, drives a tractor, hunts, handles a firearm, or watches Duck Dynasty. We noted the same delusion earlier, in the USA Today article lamenting Sheehan’s abandonment of issues “most Americans” cared about. Like Reeves, the article ascribes Sheehan’s fall to a descent into “fringe politics.” The hapless apparatchik who batted out that assertion believed it, believe us. So did his editor. If you told them most Americans always considered Cindy Sheehan a weirdo, they would stare at you, uncomprehendingly.

Cindy Sheehan rose to prominence as a progressive icon because her activism perfectly suited the liberal agenda during the Bush presidency. She was lucky in this regard, not calculating. No woman who runs for office with Roseanne Barr is capable of serious calculation. Cindy no more made herself than unmade herself. Driven by narcissism, grief, anger, and a blurry dose of soccer-mom liberalism, Cindy Sheehan responded to media encouragement with ever-shriller, ever more radical demands and accusations. So long as her target was President Bush, her media support remained firm. Genuinely incognizant of the epochal shift Obama’s election represented, Sheehan took the absence of media and public support personally and mistakenly supposed she could rekindle it by targeting Obama. She ran for office in unapproved ways against sacred establishment icons, even challenging Jerry Brown in California’s 2104 gubernatorial race–with predictable results. By refusing to take hints when offered, she isolated herself form the establishment media, effectively assuring her extinction.

Another win for the lumpenproletariat!

T he Left made Cindy Sheehan a pop-political commodity, and the Left dropped her when her propaganda value expired. One might expect the media’s current fixation on anathematizing Donald Trump to revive her utility–but the sad fact is, besides all her babble and billingsgate, Cindy Sheehan managed to speak too much truth to (actual) power to be forgiven. Toward the end, she either figured this out herself, or had it explained to her well enough that she could rephrase the matter in her inimitably self-absorbed way. Attempting a tincture of Marxist panache, she told the San Francisco Review of Books: “It’s really dangerous to be sucked into the bourgeois politics of the DNC and GOP.” Dangerous to one’s media profile, yes, once one has alienated the “Demo-libs,” as Sheehan calls her former advocates. But “really dangerous” in the strict sense? Balderdash. Cindy Sheehan was never once in danger of anything more threatening than encroaching obscurity, a condition she nowadays endures atrabiliously.

Leftists will delude themselves, claiming Sheehan lost her mojo when she defied the bourgeoisie. Rather less obtusely, Sheehan argues that the bourgeoisie in fact subsumes those very Leftists, plus the pundits and pols who forsook her when she threatened “the ghoulish legacy of Obama,” to coin her phrase. Communists–the real ones–will wince at both interpretations. Cindy Sheehan lacks the intellect to ravel the intricate paralogisms of Karl Marx, but if she ever gains a glimmering, she’ll realize it was actually the lowly lumpenproletariat that did her in, not the DNC, or the GOP, or even the mass media. Cindy Sheehan’s revolution faded to black because in the real world (in the real mainstream) most Americans never gave a damn about it, and those who gave a brief, halfhearted damn, got bored and changed the station.