Angry in the Great White North

Today's example (and I will try to keep it down to one or two a day) comes from her daily MichaelMoore.com post (August 18):

[Darrell Ankarlo] said that I have said that I believe all of the troops are murderers and I have never said that, either.

Well, let's see what she actually has said.

Later in the same post she writes:

I am just anti-killing. George Bush is responsible for killing so many people, but nobody scrutinizes anything he says, especially leading up to the war.

The George W Bush killed them, using the troops. George W Bush murdered, which is a war crime, but the soldier who actually pulled the trigger or dropped the bomb is cleared of all responsibility, because he was just following orders.

We all know the so-called Nuremberg defence has no credibility, but here is an example of it being used more recently by none other than an associate of Lynne Stewart, radical activist and attorney currently serving time for passing such orders from Sheik Abdel Rahman to his minions, even as the Seik serves his life sentence for conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks.

But back to Cindy Sheehan. She knew her son would have to commit was she now calls acts of murder:

I said to my son not to go. I said, you know it's wrong, you know you're going over there. You know your unit might have to kill innocent people, you know you might die.

This might be some revisionist history here, but taking her statements at face value, she clearly understands the he'll be doing the killing. Moreover, the response she says she got clearly shows he was doing it because of his concern for his fellow soldiers, not because he was brainwashed by George W Bush:

And he says, "My buddies are going, I have to go." He said, "If I don't go someone's going to have to do my job, and my buddies will be in danger."

I suppose the argument is that George Bush sent his buddies, and so he went, and so it's the President's fault. But then you could say that George Bush is president only because a majority of people voted for him, so it was their fault. But then the electoral system was devised by a bunch of rich white landowners in the late 1700s, so let's blame them. Or their mothers for giving birth to them. Or on that damn soup of chenicals that gave rise to DNA. Or that Big Bang thing.

That's the problem with shifting responsibility backwards. You pick a point to stop that is utterly arbitrary, and reveals your agenda. The intellectually honest person puts the responsibility (or at least a good portion of it) on the person who committed the act in question, as uncomfortable as that might be. Cindy Sheehan is certain a crime is being committed, but is trying to find someone other than the soldiers to put the responsibility.

She said at the rally for Lynne Stewart (yes, the same Lynne Stewart who aided and abetted terrorists), that she took some responsibility:

I take responsibility partly for my son’s death, too. I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted...Please – teach your babies, teach your babies better than I taught my babies.

So does that make her partly responsible for murder too, in the way that she holds George W Bush responsible, but somehow leave Casey completely innocent?

Somehow I doubt she'll see it that way. He backtracking of responsibility has a very selective direction as well.

She speaks at a rally for a lawyer convicted of working with a convicted terrorist to commit further acts of terrorism, those same sorts of acts that have embroiled the West, and the United States in particular, in a War on Terror. The invasion of Iraq was part of that war (even if you don't think it was a strategically smart move). But Cindy Sheehan tries to get Lynne Stewart free, and impeach George Bush.

Logic is not her strong suit.

But then Cindy Sheehan believes the War on Terror itself is a sham:

But we were not attacked by Iraq. {applause} We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if {applause}. 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant. {applause} [emphasis added]

So she thinks that 9/11 was staged to start the war? I guess that would make the soldiers just dumb tools.

"9/11 was their Pearl Harbor". Hmmmm. I wonder if she thinks Pearl Harbor was a sham too, or buys into the theory the Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew about the attack beforehand, and allowed it to happen to get the Americans into the war? No wait, I think I know the answer:

There has always been excuses for wars, but NONE of them have been good or valid.

So there you go. The troops aren't murderers, though they follow the orders of murderers, and I taught Casey to follow the orders of murderous leaders of a country that I know to be morally repugnant, in a war that I know to be phony, because I know all wars are phony.

But it's all George W Bush's fault.