Latimer on Law

Cindy Sheehan - A Sarah Palin Of The Left?

                                                     Cindy Sheehan - A Sarah Palin Of The Left?

             I attended a talk by anti-war spokesperson Cindy Sheehan in Falmouth tonight, hoping to hear some common sense and gain  some insight about American politics, but I was disappointed.  I  respect Ms. Sheehan's efforts in the cause of peace, and I empathize with the loss of her son in Iraq, but while she clearly sees many of the problems with American society today, she misses the mark widely in her notion of what needs to be done to set America right after the eight-year Bush administration debacle.

            Ms. Sheehan discussed what she calls "myths" about American society and, for the most part she hit the target.  Yes, we are guilty of what others, including myself, have called American exceptionalism or, as she puts it, believing that America is the "greatest country in the universe."  Yes, we are a class-based society, with a corporate elite that has an overbearing and corrupting influence on the economy, on politics and on the culture itself.  Yes, the mass media has, through lax regulatory policies permitting corporate control of news content, become corrupted.

           But then, after demonizing the Democrats as personified by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Ms. Sheehan suggests that elections don't matter, that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans and that what we need is more third party involvement in the electoral process -the same nihilist crap we get from the right-wing libertarian fools.  Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

          After her presentation the microphone was opened for questions from the audience, so I rose to address those three issues.  After stating my general agreement with her critique of corporate capitalism's corrupting influence on American society, I asked her specifically about the 2000 election, where the corporate sponsored GOP stole the election from Democrat Al Gore with the willing assistance of Ralph Nader's Green Party. 

          I asked Ms. Sheehan whether she really believes that if Gore had been elected instead of Bush, he would have started an oil war in Iraq while pretending to be going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  Didn't she think that Gore might have instead spent the trillion or so dollars squandered in Iraq on developing alternative renewable energy technologies to replace fossil fuels?

          I was most disappointed by her disingenuous attempt to deflect these questions by alluding to Gore's personal friendship with Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum instead of giving me a straight up yes or no answer, and if yes explaining why in terms of actual policy positions taken by Gore instead of referring to an irrelevant personal acquaintance with an oil magnate.

           I'm sure, for example, that Gore also has many personal friends in the environmental movement, so why should his acquaintance with Hammer have influenced him to invade Iraq, as opposed to his other friends convincing him to spend the money on developing alternative energy technologies?   Does she really think that petroleum industry money didn't have something to do with rigging the election in Florida, a state governed by a scion of the Bush petroleum fortune?  And does she really think that didn't  have everything to do with Gore's actual position on energy policy?

          On follow up, I asked Ms. Sheehan if she had really listened to Obama's Cairo speech where he not only expressly repudiated the concept of a holy war with Islam, but also repudiated the Bush administration's neoconservative "nation building" policy in Afghanistan.  She again deflected the question by alluding to the fact that Obama didn't say this about Israeli policy, or didn't say that about Iran -the same kind of evasive flak we've come to expect from right-wing blowhards like Limbaugh or Hannity and their wannabes who occasionally respond to my posts on this site.

          I said Obama's only been in office for six months but she seems to think that he can just snap his fingers to undo eight years of Bush administration corruption and bungling, and then I walked out. Incredible!

          By the way, I am one of those people who gets involved politically on the local level with long service on Falmouth's Conservation Commission, Town Meeting, the Planning Board and several other ad hoc committees and environmental groups like Citizens for Protection of Waquoit Bay and the 300 Committee.  I have also been very outspoken in the local and regional media over the years, as well as on this site, on many of the same issues that concern Ms. Sheehan.

         Yes, such local involvement is important as Ms. Sheehan suggests, but to dismiss the necessity of a strong federal government like she does, a central government that takes its responsibility for environmental protection and business regulation seriously, is nonsense.  And that's exactly where elections make a difference, and where the Democratic Party is distinctly different from the GOP,  in addition to protecting our basic liberties instead of corporate profits through the appointment of judges to the federal bench.

          My question about the 2000 election was indeed a difficult one for her claims  that there's no difference between the Dems and the GOP, and that elections don't matter, because although he probably would have authorized a limited mission in Afghanistan to capture bin Laden, Gore certainly would not have started an oil war in Iraq.  If Ms. Sheehan were honest, she would have to admit that fact but, then, the question arises whether her son might still be alive.  It's an unanswerable question because there are so many contingencies in this tenuous hold on life we all share, not just as Americans, but as human beings.  Still, I was disappointed in Ms. Sheehan for evading such a difficult question by deflecting it, just like the right-wing ideologues always do.

         Later, it occurred to me that Ms. Sheehan is in some ways a Sarah Palin of the left.  She is more intelligent and more knowledgable than Palin, and she has a better grasp on the basic problems with American society to be sure, but that's not saying very much is it?  Ms. Sheehan's heart is also in the right place, unlike Palin's, but the analogy is apt in light of her tendency to deflect difficult questions about politics or policy by changing the subject, as Palin did in debates and interviews all through the 2008 presidential campaign.