Here’s a little coverage of the Cindy Sheehan story. Sheehan is a significant threat to the right wing’s public relations efforts to maintain a high level of pro-war spirit. News story about the Cindy Sheehan peace vigil in Texas near Bush retreat. Bush has tried to placate Sheehan by sending senior officials to talk to her. But she wants to talk to Bush.

[UPDATE: Here’s Cindy Sheehan’s personal diary of her vigil over at DailyKOS]

[CLARIFICATION: Don’t get the idea that your friendly neighborhood RadMod is on board with Sheehan’s position. I just use the Sheehan issue as a springboard to discuss right wing media excess. Bush lied us into war, that seems pretty clear now. But we’re there, we broke it, we gotta fix it up a bit. Abandoning Iraq now would be worst than invading it under false pretenses.]

Sheehan’s son was killed in Iraq. She asked herself why. She discovered that she turned away from Bush when she began to critically examine the real logic, or lack thereof, behind the Iraq War.

As a result of her famous conversion from Bush supporter to Bush enemy, the anti-Bush forces have made her a celebrity.

Being a celebrity who is a sympathetic figure, she represents a significant threat to convert others to look more critically at right-wing war propaganda.

Their war propaganda will not withstand such scrutiny, fears the right wing. The faithful will be at risk of conversion, so the right wing fears. They feel it coming, and the polls are showing it too.

Therefore, Cindy Sheehan must be destroyed, they have decreed.

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O’Reilly is firing shots at Cindy Sheehan, for her “association” with Michael Moore.

Moore is an anti-war activist. Sheehan became an anti-war activist. Moore and Sheehan have something in common now. Out of the vast spectrum of political topics, Moore and Sheehan agree on their anti-war stance now, and therefore O’Reilly smears Sheehan the same way he smears Moore.

[ASIDE: Contrary to the views of the right wing media, those who disagree with right wing policies are not UnAmerican because of their vocal disagreement. On the contrary, it is absolutely UnAmerican and UnPatriotic to accuse others of being unpatriotic just because they disagree with the official governmental policies or with right wing othodoxy. ’nuff said]

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I rebuke O’Reilly for being a part of the right wing attack machine and trying to smear Cindy Sheehan, because he can’t logically argue with her heartfelt conversion to an anti-war stance. He knows she is the “real thing”.

The only way the right wing can blunt Sheehan’s persuasive power is to somehow make it politically yucky for anyone to talk sympathetically about her. Therefore, he tries to place her in the same cesspool with Michael Moore (in the minds of the faithful). Her message can’t bubble up from the bottom of the pool of filth in which Micheal Moore lives, O’Reilly thinks.

FoxNews is rushing to O’Reilly’s defense over the Sheehan smear, as reported by MediaMatters.org, with Fox trying to argue that O’Reilly’s suggestion that Sheehan was being kinda “treasonous” (and other things) was not really an unAmerican tar and feathering off a peaceful dissenter. Bulls–t.

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The libertarian-conservative site, www.LewRockwell.com, takes O’Reilly to task for his smear campaign. See the excerpt and link below.

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I’m ashamed of O’Reilly. He holds an unofficial public trust, as a powerful commentator. But power tends to corrupt, as great thinkers have reminded us throughout history.

For much, much more on unAmerican right wing media propagandizing, and right wing dishonest spinning and distorting, see the great watchdog site MediaMatters.org. Most of the time, MM makes its case. Sometimes MM falls short, but no one’s perfect.

Conservative Media Smearing Cindy Sheehan by Russell Moore

As the casualties continue to escalate in Iraq, (approaching 1900) and the publics support for the debacle erodes, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the pro-Bush media pull out all the stops to protect their Duce.

After all, it’s only because Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin are sycophants that they have become so well known.

But it appears that even I – who know how despicable neo-cons are – underestimated precisely how low and despicable O’Reilly and Malkin truly are.

The man who likes to make dirty phone calls to his staff inferiors, apparently thinks it’s morally repulsive for the heroic Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a dead US army specialist to ask the president why he got her son killed. In my opinion, this moron lost his moral authority when he paid his former staff member millions of dollars to not sue him.

O’Reilly feels that because Sheehan has aligned herself with peace advocate Michael Moore, she cannot be taken seriously.

“She has aligned herself with people who hate this country, hate this government,” stated O’Reilly on The Factor.

In typical fascist fashion, O’Reilly implies that a person cannot hate his government and love his country. It’s as if the country and the government were one in the same thing.

It would also be interesting to know who taught O’Reilly logic, because I think he has grounds to sue that man.

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