Via Breitbart, I wonder what the precise moment was when Sheehan’s Absolute Moral Authority expired for lefties. Remember that old Maureen Dowd column, written at the height of liberal anti-war sentiment when progressives were lining Sheehan up as some sort of trump card in the media battle over Iraq? Quote: “[T]he moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.” Here she is now, not quite 10 years later, calling President Peace Prize a war criminal. QED for the left?

Actually, it’s Steve Malzberg who nudges her towards the “reverse racism” point. Sheehan’s initial diagnosis is correct: Most Democratic support for Obama’s wars is a matter of partisan hackery, not granting the first black president more leeway. If Hillary had pulled through in 2008 and beaten McCain, you’d see much the same lefty hackery in defense of her (even greater) hawkishness, just as you’d see roughly the same level of conservative opposition no matter what the left would have you believe about racist right-wing motives. If Obama’s gotten any extra slack from anti-war progressives, I think it has to do less with race than with his Hopenchange shtick not fitting into the standard dovish narrative about Washington’s inexhaustible war machine. He ran as the young anti-establishment outsider, a man sufficiently removed from D.C. groupthink that he could see the Iraq war would go badly when others like Hillary couldn’t. I think he gets credit from lefties for that to this day, no matter how many countries he bombs and how many jihadis he drones. If Obama thinks it’s time for military action, there must be good reason to think there is; he’s not Clinton, looking for people to fight abroad in the name of doing her friends in the defense industry a favor. It’s a matter of trust.

And, of course, it’s a matter of exhaustion. After five years of screeching that Bush’s warmongering was a threat to civilization itself, they were invested psychologically in presenting his successor as comparatively judicious and peaceful, whatever his actions to the contrary. Only the most devout doves, like Cindy Sheehan, could keep it up through six years of Obama. Hillary would have benefited from the same phenomenon had she taken office in 2009. I do wonder, though, if she’ll benefit to the same degree if she ends up taking office in 2017 instead. Lefties won’t feel the need to defend her as urgently: Coming off eight years of Democratic, not Republican, rule, the yardstick against which she’ll be measured will be Obama, not Bush. And of course “the Clinton machine,” so entrenched and monolithic, is a more attractive target for a faction of doves that sees itself as pitted against a faceless, remorseless hawkish establishment. There will be a revival of the anti-war movement under Hillary — not a serious one, and not because she’s not black, but it’ll happen.