Usually I get most of the Sunday New York Times a day early, what with many sections being included Saturday's home delivery. Down here in Bermuda, I got Sunday's edition a day late, so I caught up with the world over lunch this afternoon. A highlight of the Sunday paper most weeks is Frank Rich's column, which is consistently brilliant. Rich was on form this past weekend, with a spot-on indictment of the Bush crowd's penchant for character assassination. This is one of the things that I despise about these people now running the show: they are willing to do just about anything to get--or stay in--power. These "chickenhawks" in charge of the war are now facing Cindy Sheehan who is positioned to expose their hypocrisy for what it is. Here is a tasty snippet from Rich's column:
Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam r�sum�s: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson--the diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991--was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.
True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of Fahrenheit 9/11. Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents--there's nothing about it that's real."
But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.
Of course, the fact that this commentary appeared in the Times means that, as usual, the President's apologists will dismiss such sentiments as part of the pervasive "liberal media" that supposedly dominates American life (in spite of the considerable evidence to the contrary!).
