Consider this an open letter…

…in response to the latest comment from wingnut pal 'o Upper Left, the Analog Kid (we're still pals, right Kid? I mean, despite my dearth of intellectual honesty and credibility and all?). It got a bit long for comments, and carries a couple thoughts that I think merit wider attention than comments sometimes get…

OK, Kid. Credit where it's due. You did make some effort to, well, if not moderate, at least disguise your vitriol. I get that Cindy Sheehan has proven to be a major embarassment for your side, and that's got to piss you off.

I'm not particularly fond of gratuitous references to National Socialism myself, but it's a cancer that's invaded the discourse of both camps these days, I suppose, to the benefit of neither.

(I'm in awe of your ability to listen to Mike Webb, twice in a week at that. The guy drives me nuts.)

Just as volume doesn't make an argument more persuasive, the use of all caps doesn't make an assertion factual.

I don't have much to say about most of your assertions because I frankly don't much care. I don't know, nor do you, what her motives are. I suspect they are complex, and to some degree in flux.

I haven't seen her bed down for the night myself, so I don't really know much about her living conditions except some second hand reports. I suspect the same is largely true of you. Fact is, for every bit of documentation you can produce that 'proves' that she beds down in satin pillows and is carted from place to place in a padded sedan chair held aloft by a sextet of well oiled body builders, I'll find one that reports that she sleeps in a hair shirt on a bed of nails and crawls prostrate on sharp crushed rocks laid out in a path to her every destination.

It doesn't matter. I care not a whit about her lifestyle, at or away from Crawford. Her motives seem pretty straightforward. She wants to confront Bush about the justifications for the war that took her son's life, and she wants that war to end. It's a good thing that I'm not her tactical advisor, because I never would have imagined she would get the mileage out of her vigil that she's gotten.

Cindy Sheehan's son was killed in a war. She says wants to talk to the Commander in Chief about it. I suspect that if she gets her wish, she'll find the experience singularly unsatisfying. I think she knows that.

He would doubtless find the experience uncomfortable at best, and potentially humiliating. He is not a man noted for grace in such circumstances, after all, and the no conversation with a parent about the death of a child can be comfortable, except perhaps for genuine sociopaths.

All he had to do is talk to her, though, and this story would have blown away with the next news cycle. It's too late for that, now. Until a few days ago, Sheehan had been a fairly minor figure in a diffuse, generally ineffective, anti-war movement. Now she's a central focus in a movement that's growing growing around her exponentially, organically, almost accidentally because of the simple power of one woman's witness.

One thing seems sure. Karl's mojo is gone. Time to dump him...