CINDY SHEEHAN ON HARDBALL

Saw Cindy Sheehan on Hardball this evening. Chris Matthews was so impressed with her he gave her quite a lot of air time and finished by asking her if she was running for Congress (is that the latest right-wing screed?). When Cindy replied "not this time" and said she's a one-issue lady just trying to get the troops home, Tweety very sincerely remarked that she knows more about the Iraq War than most Congressmen. Another subject Chris raised was whether Cindy would feel the same if her son had been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq. She thought for a second and then replied no, she didn't think she would, because in both cases we invaded sovereign countries and killed innocents when we were after a specific group of people, and we didn't catch the worst culprits anyway in Afghanistan. She went on to link these wars with a desire on the Bush administration for other, future adventurism to foster a new American imperialism in the Middle East. Chris found that interesting since, as he said, most Americans saw the war in Afghanistan as justified since the government was harboring Al Qaeda. Towards the end of the interview he asked Cindy about the intra-family dispute over her crusade, and she and her sister (who joined her in the interview) answered very diplomatically that these things happen in families, that, as Chris suggested, it's a partisan thing. Queried about her husband's filing for divorce, Cindy simply said that he fully supports her views but not her intensity and said that was all she was going to say about that.

Then he switched to a mother whose son has served two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan who is a Bush supporter, and an Iraqi woman who said we should keep troops in Iraq until they are "ready to stand up on their own." When Chris asked how long that would be they both more or less said, "Till whenever." Chris remarked that if that's five or ten years, Americans aren't going to like it. He asked each woman who the "enemy" is in Iraq. Both answered that it's foreign fighters. The mother kept talking about the "insurgents," and Chris corrected her by saying he didn't think she should be using the term insurgents since that indicates the indigenous peoples, not foreigners. Chris asked the mother if her son who is fighting in Iraq tells her that ordinary Iraqis support us and she said yes, definitely. He didn't keep those two on nearly as long as he did Cindy.

The contrast was great between the soft-spoken Cindy Sheehan, who was both knowledgeable and articulate about the issues surrounding the so-called "war on terror" and the mother (whose son, it should be noted, is still alive) who supports the pResident. The latter seemed to think that it would be a dis to her son's and the other troops' sacrifices if we pulled out before the "job is finished." While Cindy, when asked a similar question, stated that her heart and soul had been torn out with the death of her son, and why would she or any mother want any other mother to go through that just to justify in some weird way the death of her own son?

UPDATE: All the better. The actual transcript is here.