State of the Sheehan

Let me lay a few things out there before I get into the meat of this.

1) I think G.W. Bush is an awful President, a puppet of a group of scary individuals that are taking this country down a road into a theocracy that I can't abide. I don't actually think that Dubya is an awful person, I think he's an idiot, but an idiot in the hands of truly dangerous people.

2) I think the war in Iraq is a mess we should never have gotten into, and will now find ourselves mired in for years to come. We cannot pull out immediately, no matter how much I would like to. But I hate the fact that we are there.

3) I think war is the ultimate failure of diplomacy. I don't remember who I stole that phrase from.

4) I think freedom of speech is one of the foundation blocks of our country and should be mostly inviolate.

All that said, Cindy Sheehan deserves to spend the night in jail. Or three. While she was in a publicly owned facility expressing her free opinion, she wasn't in public. She was at a private event for lawmakers and other invited persons, behaving in a manner that the people hosting the event felt was inappropriate, and she was escorted out. Period.

Worse, she has now made a public mockery out of everything she was accomplishing. She became famous not for badgering Dubya, but for sitting patiently, Gandhi-style, outside his ranch. She earned my admiration for sticking to a set of principles and for NOT going over the top with a big splashy stunt. Like last night. All she managed to accomplish was piss off the middle, the swing vote 20% that will decide the next election. With less than 50% voter turnout at the polls, we're looking at increasingly close elections until the person comes along that can really galvanize the country. PS - Hillary ain't it. So when the opposition (Dems, liberals, whatever) does anything to make the sitting party/group look like they are in the right, they lose.

Cindy Sheehan did no good for her son's memory last night. In my less than humble opinion, because, after all, this is a blog and everyone who writes a blog must be an arrogant genius, she betrayed the methods of her movement and destroyed her strength and credibility by her antics.

There, my political post. Don't hold your breath for the next one, cause I'm pulling for McCain/Obama in '08 on the Independent ticket.