"Get Over It."

I really, really like my computer monitor. It's a good Dell flatscreen, and it was gift from my beloved Vicki. I want you to understand that I really, really like it.

So it was kind of odd when I wanted to put my fist through the monitor yesterday.

I've tried not to blog about Cindy Sheehan - the grieving mother of Casey Sheean, killed in action in Iraq in 2004. For those of you who don't know, Cindy is camping outside of Bush's vacation ranch in Texas, asking to speak to the President so she can ask a very simple question - why is her son dead?

Mrs. Sheehan could rightly ask a few other questions while she's there - for instance, why is the President taking a 5-week vacation while the US is at war? (And lest you be under any illusions, Bush re-declared the war a few weeks ago.)

The wingnuts out there could rightly point out that FDR was away from the Oval office for much - maybe most - of World War II. And I would point out that A) this was mostly medical leave, and B) FDR's Polio-crippled legs would've been better suited for the Presidency than George W. Bush.

I didn't want to blog about this for a number of reasons - namely, every other blogger in the universe is already on it, so I figure if you want to know about it, you already do.

However, something Steve Gilliard re-posted at his blog struck a nerve, by which I mean I had to suppress my urge to kill. Once upon a time, conservatives would have responded to a woman like Cindy Sheehan with a very simple talking point - or a variation on it: "We feel for Mrs. Sheehan's loss, but her son died in a noble cause to liberate the people of Iraq. As painful as his death is - to her, and to the country - he did not die in vain, and we salute his sacrifice." Bush would then speak with Mrs. Sheehan for 30 minutes, and continue his disastrous policies anyway. End of the story.

While there are rational conservatives out there, they don't seem to be the ones in charge anymore. Instead of a quick, relatively painless lancing of the PR boil, Sheehan has been attacked in some of the most vicious ways imaginable - Michelle Malkin has pretended to know Casey Sheehan better than his own mother, saying he would be ashamed of his mother's actions. Mrs. Sheehan's been called a whore (of course, immediately retracted, like that means a damn.) Mrs. Sheehan is widely perceived by the lunatic right to be a "puppet" of the left, as if a mother of four could be made the puppet of any movement.

Sadly, this is par for the course for modern conservatives. This part of the sliming didn't goad me in to blogging, but some unfortunate news, combined with the latest iteration in right-wing talking points did.

Here is part of the post that Steve linked to:

Yes, it is a terrible thing to lose a child. But I'm getting tired of hearing the rote assertion that it's the worst thing that can ever happen to you, you never get over it, and no one who hasn't had the experience can ever understand. It's as if this category of event, "lose a child," represents some kind of emotional tree-line which, once passed, automatically elevates a person into a new state of existence from which ordinary mortals are excluded. It's the Skull & Bones of parenthood, an elite membership which confers extraordinary privilege and exemption from all merely human judgment or criticism.

Pardon me, but that's a crock. On several levels. Anyone who has lived more than a few decades comes to understand that life is largely about loss. The longer we survive, the more we lose: grandparents, parents, friends, lovers, wives, husbands, family, pets...

Pets? Fuck you.

As recently as the Victorian era, infant and child mortality was so pervasive that few large families did not experience it. Before the age of modern medicine, sudden, unexpected death was an everyday companion of the living. They learned to control grief with defined periods of mourning in prescribed clothes and then to proceed with life. And they learned not to lose their faith and humility in the process....

But we must not blow the whistle on Cindy Sheehan? She has contrived to turn her son's death and the whole Iraq War into her own personal soap opera. This was all something done to her. By the President of the United States, no less. Let us take all our cameras to Texas and watch her bleed from her hands and feet. Nonsense. It's time for some plain talk.

Her plight is a very far cry from that of a mother who views the mutilated body of her six-year old daughter at the morgue. Cindy Sheehan's son was a man -- more a full-grown man than his mother is a full-grown woman -- and the sacrifice that was made was his, not hers, willingly given in return for compensations that made sense to him at the time he decided to join the military.

I hardly know where to begin. I suppose I should start with the ridiculous - the idea that people were made of sterner stuff in the Victorian age. Bullshit. Mothers who lost children in childbirth, or within the first weeks of life, often convalesced for months afterwards - despite being physically healthy. Moreover, the comparison between a mother who goes through the pain and suffering of (for example) a miscarriage and Cindy Sheehan's loss is simply offensive. Casey was, by all accounts, a healthy young man with a long life ahead of him. He was obviously beloved by his family (all of his immediate family is supporting Cindy.) He was in what should have been the prime of his life - and then he was killed in Sadr City.

This asshole that Steve posted to (I refuse to identify him further) has obviously never been touched by serious loss, despite his oh-so-worldly pronouncements about "the longer we survive..." The sudden loss of a loved one - sibling, child, lover, whatever - can destroy people. My aunt was killed suddenly many years ago now, and it reduced my grandmother to a shell of her former self. (It's a perverse universe that would suddenly make an 80-year old woman outlive her youngest daughter.) I've known families that were nearly wrecked by the loss of a child or parent.

Anyone who's ever lost a loved one should understand what Mrs. Sheehan's doing, whether you agree with it or not. In any other age, Cindy Sheehan's right to demand answers - as a mother, and as a citizen - would have been unquestionable.

This age is not any other age. In this age, Sheehan is a whore.

Conservatives, I hope you sleep well at night.