Cindy Update!

In an not all too surprising turn of events, Cindy Sheehan is apparently having second thoughts about her bed fellows. The Washington Post (that bastion of liberalism) reports today in a piece by Michael Fletcher a couple of interesting points:

...." The same wave of publicity and political anger that she rode to become a nationally known symbol of the anti-war movement threatens to crash down on Sheehan herself Cindy Sheehan hugs a supporter at her protest site in Crawford, Tex. Conservatives have criticized her, and she says some sympathetic groups have agendas she does not share. Conservative commentators and Web sites are taking aim at Sheehan with the same ferocity she has aimed at President Bush. In part, they are using her own words against her -- reciting such controversial comments as her vow to refuse to pay taxes to a government waging an "illegal" war and her desire to see Bush impeached."

"The backlash is becoming a new object lesson in how saturation media coverage and the instinct for personal attack are shaping political debate. Some independent commentators said the pushback on the right has succeeded at scuffing the public sympathy and deference she had earned as the mother of a fallen soldier, and has shown how virtually any subject relating to the Iraq war and Bush's presidency is viewed through a partisan lens.
"Cindy Sheehan has emboldened the progressives who oppose the war and caused the conservative diehards who are behind the war to go into a defensive mode," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade publication for talk radio. "Cindy Sheehan is going to be a target, and they'll probably go through her past to find what they can to discredit he. 'It's obvious Cindy Sheehan has become a political player, whose primary concern is embarrassing the president,' Fox Television personality Bill O'Reilly wrote Tuesday in an online column.'She is no longer just a protester.'"

It will be interesting to see what happens. Despite the poling data showing a lack of support for the war, there are many more conservatives and moderates in the nation who will not stand for a continued barrage of criticism aimed at the armed forces, the president and the nation. This is not 1973 and George Bush is not Richard Nixon. The old hippies and the extremists on the left need to give up the move to try to make this like Vietnam. That is history.

The saddest footnote to this may be the epitaph of Vietnam. The US never lost a firefight or military action. They descimated the Vietcong but if you read a paper between 1970- and 1975, a text book now, or listed to an average college professor lecture on the war in Vietnam you'd never know it. The US won the war, but the media and the liberals lost the peace. We can not let that happen in Iraq.