From Slate:
There are, in fact, some principles involved here. Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don’t have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive’s ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders.
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? This is just as objectionable, on logical as well as moral grounds, as the old pro-war argument that the dead “must not have died in vain.” I distrust anyone who claims to speak for the fallen, and I distrust even more the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the grief of those who have to bury them.
Indeed.
***
Update:
Charles Krauthammer could not have said it better today on the Fox panel:
"She deserves honor and respect for her loss and her grief, but she deserves no honor and respect in how she has exploited her loss and her grief to create a circus, to libel the United States of America, and its troops and its leaders. And it is libel what she has been saying, that the war is all about oil, it's all about imperialism. It's hurting our troops and it's endangering our troops...
"I'm attacking the substance of what she's saying, and the fact that she is a mother who has a great loss does not validate her statements. And they have to be attacked because they are libeling America and endangering America, and they are untrue from beginning to end."
(Fox's Special Report, 8/16/05)
