Monday, August 15, 2005

Hitch on Cindy Sheehan's "moral authority."

Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle - What's wrong with her Crawford protest. By Christopher Hitchens.

I had a friend use the Cindy Sheehan/Maureen Dowd argument on me regarding the war in Iraq recently, that being (roughly) that the moral authority of the parents of soldiers, especially dead ones, is absolute. We were discussing policy and the politics of the war in a fairly rational way., But then he brought out the big gun: "Yeah, well you don't have a nephew in Iraq with a target on his back." For some people, a direct (even if only emotional) connection to an issue trumps critical thinking. It's a form of political correctness that says:
  • you can't have an opinion on abortion if you're not a woman

  • you can't say anything about affirmative action if you're not black

  • you have to shut up about (fill in the blank) unless you've walked a mile in my shoes.

I say nonsense. So does Hitch. Here's a salient quote on the Cindy situation:
What dreary sentimental nonsense this all is, and how much space has been wasted on it. Most irritating is the snide idea that the president is "on vacation" and thus idly ignoring his suffering subjects, when the truth is that the members of the media—not known for their immunity to the charm of Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod in the month of August—are themselves lazing away the season with a soft-centered nonstory that practically, as we like to say in the trade, "writes itself." Anyway, Sheehan now says that if need be she will "follow" the president "to Washington," so I don't think the holiday sneer has much life left in it.

Read the whole article. Hitchens is smarter than 90 percent of us, and well worth the time.

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