Another way of looking at the Crawford standoff.
I have a different point of view about the Crawford standoff. While it may seem that the anti-war folks are getting angrier by the day over Bush’s refusal to meet with the protestors, I contend that every day he doesn’t meet with them is secretly heralded as a victory by some of those folks.
Allow me to explain:
Casey Sheehan’s mother has camped out near President Bush’s residence in Crawford, Texas for eight days now, insisting on another meeting with him so he can answer some questions. It’s painfully obvious that another meeting ( for a myriad of reasons) is very, very unlikely to happen. Had every anti-war group not gotten involved in organizing the circus surrounding Sheehen’s mother, there might have been a sliver of a chance Bush would have sent a car down to pick her up.
But that was when it was one greiving woman wanting to talk to one very powerful man.
Now Sheehan’s mother carries the banner of every anti-war liberal group, and Bush would never (nor would any President) entertain an audience with a person who represents groups with such radical agendas. We all know this. Bush is no more likely to address this woman one-on-one than he is to address the head of any hard core left wing organization, since seemingly, she represents them now.
Presidents rarely acknowledge the fringe, and groups like Move-on.org have dragged Sheehan’s mother out to the very fringiest part of the fringe.
My guess is that if the President would have met with Sheehan’s mother when she first arrived, there is a chance that they might have had an honest, private heart-to-heart talk, Bush could have reassured her that Casey’s death was not in vain, and they could have posed for another picture while he administered another Presidential peck on the cheek, just like last time. If it had played out like that, Sheehen’s mother would have been vitrually useless to the anti-war groups. It’s Bush’s refusal to speak with her ( probably because of them) makes her the most valuable spokesperson for the left since Michael Moore. It works to their advantage that the President doesn’t speak to her, and by their actions, it’s almost as if they are trying to ensure that Bush wouldn’t get near her with a 10,000 foot pole.
This whole thing looks to me like an exercise in straw-man-ism, being played out in real time with human actors. Part of what makes Sheehan’s mother so sympathetic is that the President refuses to meet with her, yet nothing being done on her behalf by these groups is doing anything but decreasing the chances she will get her wish. The result is a character that becomes more sympathetic day by day, and from where I sit, it looks like that’s right where the radical lefties want her. The bigger the victim, the more use she is to them, and the more they’ll ratchet up the vitriol to ensure that she stays that way.
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