[Mb-civic] Why No Tea and Sympathy?

[Jef Bek]

New York Times
August 10, 2005

Why No Tea and Sympathy?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

W. can't get no satisfaction on Iraq.

There's an angry mother of a dead soldier camping outside his Crawford
ranch, demanding to see a president who prefers his sympathy to be carefully
choreographed.

A new CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans now think
that going to war was a mistake and that the war has made the U.S. more
vulnerable to terrorism. So fighting them there means it's more likely we'll
have to fight them here?

Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged yesterday that sophisticated bombs were
streaming over the border from Iran to Iraq.

And the Rolling Stones have taken a rare break from sex odes to record an
antiwar song called "Sweet Neo Con," chiding Condi Rice and Mr. Bush. "You
call yourself a Christian; I call you a hypocrite," Mick Jagger sings.

The N.F.L. put out a press release on Monday announcing that it's teaming up
with the Stones and ABC to promote "Monday Night Football." The flag-waving
N.F.L. could still back out if there's pressure, but the mood seems to have
shifted since Madonna chickened out of showing an antiwar music video in
2003. The White House used to be able to tamp down criticism by saying it
hurt our troops, but more people are asking the White House to explain how
it plans to stop our troops from getting hurt.

Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for P.R., says she
will camp out in the dusty heat near the ranch until she gets to tell Mr.
Bush face to face that he must pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Her son,
Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in a Sadr City ambush last
year.

The president met with her family two months after Casey's death. Capturing
W.'s awkwardness in traversing the line between somber and joking, and his
love of generic labels, Ms. Sheehan said that W. had referred to her as
"Mom" throughout the meeting, and given her the sense that he did not know
who her son was. 

The Bush team tried to discredit "Mom" by pointing reporters to an old
article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an
undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him. But even if they
send out a squad of Swift Boat Moms for Truth, there will be a countering
Falluja Moms for Truth.

It's amazing that the White House does not have the elementary shrewdness to
have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear the woman out, or
invite her in for a cup of tea. But W., who has spent nearly 20 percent of
his presidency at his ranch, is burrowed into his five-week vacation and
two-hour daily workouts. He may be in great shape, but Iraq sure isn't.

It's hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation.
His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone
who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is
cognitively injurious. He's a populist who never meets people - an ordinary
guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to. Mr. Bush
hails Texas as a place where he can return to his roots. But is he mixing it
up there with anyone besides Vulcans, Pioneers and Rangers?

W.'s idea of consolation was to dispatch Stephen Hadley, the national
security adviser, to talk to Ms. Sheehan, underscoring the inhumane
humanitarianism of his foreign policy. Mr. Hadley is just a suit, one of the
hard-line Unsweet Neo Cons who helped hype America into this war.

It's getting harder for the president to hide from the human consequences of
his actions and to control human sentiment about the war by pulling a
curtain over the 1,835 troops killed in Iraq; the more than 13,000 wounded,
many shorn of limbs; and the number of slain Iraqi civilians - perhaps
25,000, or perhaps double or triple that. More people with impeccable
credentials are coming forward to serve as a countervailing moral authority
to challenge Mr. Bush.

Paul Hackett, a Marine major who served in Iraq and criticized the president
on his conduct of the war, narrowly lost last week when he ran for Congress
as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold in Cincinnati. Newt Gingrich warned
that the race should "serve as a wake-up call to Republicans" about 2006.

Selectively humane, Mr. Bush justified his Iraq war by stressing the 9/11
losses. He emphasized the humanity of the Iraqis who desire freedom when his
W.M.D. rationale vaporized.

But his humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to
understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in
Iraq is absolute.