christopher hitchens' sinister smear

The British bad-boy neocon apologist really seems to have his knickers in a twist about Cindy Sheehan's camping trip, as you can read in his latest rant entitled Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle. He's also upset with Maureen Dowd for recently stating in a column "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." Doesn't Cindy know that opinions on U.S. foreign policy should be left to the enlightened ones who work for the almighty mainstream media outlets, even if they are British-born Trotskyites who never served and never had any children who served (and died)? And that uppity Maureen, how dare she betray her corporate media masters and grant credence to a mere U.S. citizen!

Contained within the column are these baffling sentences:

Most irritating is the snide idea that the president is "on vacation" and thus idly ignoring his suffering subjects, when the truth is that the members of the media—not known for their immunity to the charm of Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod in the month of August—are themselves lazing away the season with a soft-centered nonstory that practically, as we like to say in the trade, "writes itself." Anyway, Sheehan now says that if need be she will "follow" the president "to Washington," so I don't think the holiday sneer has much life left in it.

So let me see...first, despite everything we've read about how the president is on vacation at his ranch, it apparently irritates Hitchens when a journalist reports that he is "on vacation". What else are they supposed to call it? And my gosh, you mean that members of the media actually go on vacation themselves at Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod? Those self-serving bastards, how dare they! And then, he seems equally upset that Sheehan has stated she will "follow" the president "to Washington", so upset in fact that he had to put quotes around those words. I guess when Mrs. Sheehan goes to Washington immediately after Bush returns there, it is somehow not really "following", and not really "to Washington".

In the final paragraph we find the following:

Finally, I think one must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. Casey Sheehan joined up as a responsible adult volunteer. Are we so sure that he would have wanted to see his mother acquiring "a knack for P.R." and announcing that he was killed in a war for a Jewish cabal?

Chris: I know you have difficulty with this concept, so repeat after me: ISRAEL is a COUNTRY! JUDAISM is a RELIGION! Criticizing the government of Israel, as Cindy Sheehan has done, is quite a different thing than placing the blame on a "Jewish cabal".

I actually feel quite sorry for old Hitch; he no longer has Mother Teresa to beat up on, so he has to find some other females who are still living, preferably Catholics like Dowd and Sheehan, to take her place.