Cindy Sheehan has been compared to Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn’t this stupid. This kind of crap undermines Sheehan’s effectiveness as an antiwar activist and plays into the Right’s propaganda machine. I fear Ms. Sheehan has let hero-worship go to her head.
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Why is it stupid? Why are we buying into the storyline that Hugo Chavez is some kind of demon?
It doesn’t matter what Chavez is. If Sheehan has (or had) any value to the anti-war movement, it’s as a symbol that could move people who weren’t already against the war. Meaning, centrists and traditional conservatives.
These are people who believe, rightly or wrongly, that Chavez is a bad guy and an enemy of America. Now, I think this is crap, but it doesn’t matter what I think, and frankly improving Chavez’s public image in America is a real low priority right now.
By unnecessarily associating herself with Chavez Sheehan loses her symbolic value. She had a simple message — my son died in Iraq, and I want to know why. If this is changed to a complicated message that has to explain Hugo Chavez, forget it. Nobody outside the Left is going to listen.
It’s funny, though: When it comes to what the average American thinks, someone who doesn’t follow the news as closely as we do, Cindy Sheehan was just an aggrieved mother of a dead soldier — she’s off TV news and she’s in the back pages of the “quality” papers only, for the most part. We sort of “won” the Cindy Sheehan round, in the way that we “lost” with regard to Michael Moore (whose flaws are now all that anyone in the mainstream press talks about) and in the way that we lose every time there’s an actual election (things that aren’t so bad about the Democratic candidate are magnified by the mainstream press following a GOP script, so the candidate becomes a freak and a pariah in the public’s eyes).
I don’t know why we “won” with Sheehan — the scribes, I guess, had decided just at that moment that Bush had lied to them about Iraq, so they were pissed off and elevated Sheehan when they easily could have trashed her.
Oh yeah — and in this Oprah age, I guess if it weeps, it leads.
I don’t know why we “won” with Sheehan — the scribes, I guess, had decided just at that moment that Bush had lied to them about Iraq, so they were pissed off and elevated Sheehan when they easily could have trashed her.
That, and the fact that last August there was a huge pool of reporters hanging around the Crawford ranch with not much else to cover. Ms. Sheehan benefited from excellent timing. But this will not happen again.
Why are we buying into the storyline that Hugo Chavez is some kind of demon?
I don’t want to turn this into a DU-style Venezuela flamewar, but I think many on the left are mistaken to assume Chavez is who he says he is, without any kind of critical evaluation. Even though he has denounced the Bush administration many times, the Chavez government is rather autocratic in nature, and democratic participation in Venezuela has suffered greatly in the past few years.
Ivan, good points. People tend to fall into “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” trap too easily.
Yes, but for the most part, people fall into the “Bushies” propaganda line of thinking as this WAPO article outlines:
[...]“Chavez is a modern-day, Spanish-speaking Robin Hood.” Such a characterization is, of course, heresy in Washington. To listen to Bush administration officials, one would come to believe that Chavez is the greatest “negative force” against democracy and the free market since the Cold War. He has been accused of supplying weapons to Colombian rebels, of financing Bolivian and Ecuadorian groups seeking to establish “Marxist” states, and of being, with Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s guidance, a “subversive” everywhere else in the region. The truth is that Chavez is a lot of both. He is the Robin Hood who supports the poor with the money of the rich, and he is the ideologue who pushes an anti-imperialist, socialist agenda. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has chosen to take on the Chavez challenge purely in terms of the latter.”
(I forgot to put the link to the WAPO article below.) All I’m asking is: Are we doing Michelle Malkin and the “righties” work for them by agreeing with their storyline that “Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chavez are bad”?
And like Peter Dauo’s article, “Matthews, Moore, Murtha, and the Media” talks about… by demonizing or making fun of Cindy Sheehan and Hugo Chavez, are we helping them to get their “skillfully-crafted pro-GOP storylines injected into the American bloodstream.”???
http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=59f92c44-e7ec-48c4-91c7-b51768df79a3
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/25/AR2005082501420.html
Peggy, you’ve got to learn to pick your fights. Defending Hugo Chavez is not a fight I want to pick. He’s not the totalitarian villain the Bushies claim he is, but he’s not the working class saint some on the Left want him to be, either.
Bottom line: With all the other stuff on our plates; with all the problems we have getting even simple messages heard over the Republican Noise Machine, why are we even talking about Hugo Chavez? As I said earlier, doing PR for Hugo Chavez is not exactly a priority right now.
And when Cindy Sheehan allows her message to get muddied by association with Hugo Chavez, that is STUPID. I’m sorry; plain fact. This is not doing the right’s work for them. It’s understanding how to use symbolism to get your own message out. Sheehan was an effective symbol for the antiwar movement, but now she has compromised herself too much to be effective. She’ll no longer be able to get the sympathetic treatment from the press that she got in the past, for example.
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And it was just stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Rosa Parks was never that stupid.
I think the GOP has stopped fighting Cindy Sheehan (bloggers excepted) — the anti-Sheehan campaign never got traction, so they gave up and started bashing Murtha (along with returning the old favorites, Hillary and Kerry and Kennedy and the media and so on).
And as for Chavez, he has oil, and we’re already pissing off one country that can send crude to $100 a barrel at will. I think the GOP will make sure Chavez doesn’t get to the front page anytime soon.
I completely agree with Peggy, that we should not buy into the demonizing of Chavez. They want to do the same thing to Morales in Bolivia, another elected leader who wants to use his nation’s petrochemical resources for the benefit of his people.
Casey Sheehan died in part because of Bush’s lies, but also because of the motivations of various right wing players, including the military industrial complex. The U.S. can’t produce a television profitably, but we are Number 1 in weapons systems. Cindy’s meeting with diverse leftists like Chavez is natural.
If we run from Chavez and other elected leftists, then what the heck do we stand for?
If we run from Chavez and other elected leftists, then what the heck do we stand for?
What I stand for is liberalism and progressivism in the United States. And if we can turn this country around our foreign policy will also be more liberal and progressive, which will help the rest of the planet. But my focus is on THIS country, not Venezuela.
If the people of Venezuela want Chavez to be their leader, that’s fine by me. I think it is yet to be seen his policies are really helping the people of Venezuela, however, or whether he’s a charismatic leader who is more talk than walk. I don’t support all “leftists” out of tribal loyalty.
Also, in the grand scheme of things everything is connected to everything else. But I don’t see a direct connection between the war in Iraq and Chavez.
If Venezuela didn’t have any oil Chavez would have no significance at all to anyone. Bush hates him. That’s all that matters. Today Exxon Mobil announced fourth quarter profits of $7.86 billion bringing their total profit for 2005 to $67.6 Billion. From today’s Independent newspaper: “A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years. They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating. The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically”.
Why are you so down on Chavez?? He was elected.. so was Bush,,, how can he be any worse as a friend than the Saudi’s..?
I don’t know that much about him, but if Bush, Cheney and Condi don’t like him, he is probably better than I think he is.
Why are you so down on Chavez??
I’m neither up nor down on Chavez. I don’t have a strong opinion about him, one way or another. My point is that Sheehan’s association with him is an unnecessary distraction from what had been her message, and it’s a distraction that compromises her effectiveness as a spokesperson for the antiwar movement.
I’m not “picking a fight” to defend Hugo Chavez.” I’m saying, “Don’t pick on Cindy Sheehan and do the GOP’s work for them by making fun of her.”
Don’t pick on Cindy Sheehan and do the GOP’s work for them by making fun of her.
Cindy Sheehan is not Queen of the Universe. I support her only as far as she is useful to the antiwar movement. When she loses that usefulness, as I believe she is rapidly doing, I have absolutely no interest in her and will not hesitate to dump her.
I support her only as far as she is useful to the antiwar movement. When she loses that usefulness, as I believe she is rapidly doing, I have absolutely no interest in her and will not hesitate to dump her.
this is where you really lose me. she is a mom who lost her son in a war we should never have started. i AM interested in her and everyone else who has lost what is most dear to them because we (americans) failed. she has suffered enough and i hate to see her treated as a non-person by anyone.
as regards to her “usefulness” to the antiwar movement… she has contributed more, much more than most of us. and for that she should be thanked – not publicly ridiculed for her apparent lack of perfection.
i hope you will understand that i write this in the spirit of great respect for your and your blog… but you don’t speak for the anti-war movement any more than cindy sheehan does… if only perfect activists were allowed to participate, it would be a very small movement indeed.
Jan 30, 2006 
