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July 10, 2007
Taking Sheehan seriously
John Nichols, in one of the blogs featured on The Nation website, surely seeks to answer the various flippant and frivolous right-wing responses which have appeared to Cindy Sheehan's challenge to Nancy Pelosi. What prompted Sheehan to deploy her giant-like moral authority against Pelosi? Pelosi's assault on the constitution itself!
Before last year's election, Pelosi announced that impeachment was "off the table." It is probably good that she did not try to nullify another section of the Constitution -- say, the part about freedom of speech. But Pelosi did serious damage to the system of checks and balances when she declared that her House would not use the tool created by the founders to assure that the legislative branch could keep errant executives in line.Does that have anything to do with trying them for high crimes and misdemeanors? Here are Nichols' concluding paragraphs:
. . . Sheehan's notoriety would make the race a more serious one than the easy runs Pelosi has enjoyed since she won her House seat in a 1987 special election.That's the key: seriousness. Not flippancy.Could a Sheehan challenge actually upset Pelosi? That's a long shot -- and Sheehan, who is far more savvy about politics than her critics recognize, knows this.
But she also knows that politicians are most likely to respond to political pressure. So Cindy Sheehan is turning up the heat on Pelosi with a political threat that George Bush -- after his long and bitter experience of tangling with the "Peace Mom" -- would undoubtedly advise the Speaker to treat with a good measure of seriousness.
Crossposted on Judeopundit
Posted by Judeopundit at July 10, 2007 2:00 AM | TrackBack
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I had the pleasure of meeting Cindy Sheehan a few years ago. Lunatic? No! Pawn of the Democrats? No! Angry mother gripped by bottomless grief? Absolutely. And that grief put her on the road to Crawford. And being at Crawford showed the sort of person Dubya really was - and the picture wasn't pretty. I agree Pelosi has been a huge disappointment - I don't think Sheehan wants to win as much as she wants people to think about what's happening to our country and the sort of people running it. Thank you for posting this. I, for one, am getting really sick of people trying to paint Sheehan as a wack job & dismissing her out of hand. I have children too and I can only imagine how she feels. Speaking with her one & one I found her to be smart, articulate and nobody's fool.
Posted by: Barbara at July 10, 2007 7:15 PMPelosi's district includes a swath of San Francisco, IIRC. So a challenge from Sheehan may seem less odd there than elsewhere.
Cindy Sheehan's affect and speech, to me, don't seem to "mesh." When I see her and hear her, what I see and what I hear don't seem to align well - not seemingly dishonest, just dissonant. Maybe it's me, or maybe I am reading improperly into details that don't matter at all.
Posted by: Bruce/Crablaw at July 10, 2007 11:23 PMI have yet to see anything that makes me think that Sheehan is anything more than a sorry tool. I feel badly for her loss but she is not the only one who has lost someone.
Beyond that her personal politics come across as being guided solely by grief and that concerns me.
Posted by: Jack at July 13, 2007 5:57 PM