'Why Isn't Cindy Sheehan On My TV Set?'

At Ricochet, Tommy De Seno writes, “Not that I miss her, but I recall when Cindy Sheehan would protest George Bush about war, she didn’t just interrupt my regularly scheduled programming — she was my regularly scheduled programming:”

Cindy’s ability to summon the media was the admiration of the PR world, particularly when she could muster a crowd so voluminous it could only be described as “dozens of people” outside President Bush’s home. How newsworthy (note the date on that linked story – NBC still covered Sheehan protesting Bush even after Obama took office).

So taken with her was mainstream media that Maureen Dowd of the New York Times once declared Ms. Sheehan to have “absolute moral authority” on matters of war. What room is left for disagreement when one is granted “absolute” authority?

As an exemplar of the superior Sheehan word craft that had Dowd enraptured, Cindy would refer to President Bush as a “filth-spewer and warmonger.” Such beauty. Move over Shakespeare, there’s a new bard in town. As Ann Coulter pointed out, perhaps Dowd’s inspiration for her own words was absolute. “On the rocks.”

So why haven’t I seen coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s every burp on television since President Obama, without Congressional approval, began dropping bombs on a poor Arab land filled with innocent civilians?

I think we all know the answer to this, but it’s worth revisiting professional protester turned part-time actress (or is it the other way around? Janeane Garofalo response in 2003 when she asked by an interviewer why she didn’t protest Bill Clinton’s myriad foreign excursions — it’s just not hip for the professional left to protest when a fellow Democrat is in the White House. Or as Cato’s David Boaz writes:

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that antiwar activity in the United States and around the world was driven as much by antipathy to George W. Bush as by actual opposition to war and intervention.

On the other hand, if the buck can safely be passed to a Republican, and/or someone who was treated like a Republican by the far left in 2008, then perhaps the giant papier-mâché puppets can be safely deployed. Stacy McCain spots this bit of rhetorical slight of hand from Andrew Sullivan, during the same interview with Chris Matthews where he got his inner Pauline Kael on and couldn’t figure out why anyone voted for Obama:

Nothing would make Andrew Sullivan happier than to have a Bible-thumping Texas Republican back in the White House, so he could hate the American president without guilt or shame.

Instead, he’s stuck trying to claim that Obama has been duped into war by John McCain and Hillary Clinton:

I mean, you know, we go into a Middle Eastern country, we don’t know the consequences, it’s been hatched by Hillary and McCain. I mean, what could go wrong? . . .
I don’t know why anybody voted for Obama in the primaries. . . . [T]his no-fly zone, this war essentially, is, is a Hillary-McCain concept.
Look, we, people who voted for this guy wanted him to let the old politics go. . . . Wanted him to actually tell us the truth about this stuff and to do the right thing. And that was the appeal of Obama. And two years later, we have this politicized Clintonian mess.