Rich Defends the "Mainstream Mama"

Frank Rich's usual bloated, overlong column today comes running to the defence of the Gold Star Moron, Cindy Sheehan, as follows:

Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war.

Yeah, Karl and I were discussing that at dinner the other day. Rich goes on to say, "The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's 'wacko' rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son."

Sheehan hasn't forgotten her dead son. That is true. How could she? At every opportunity she spits on his memory, by crassly exploiting his death, and not just to "protest the war" -- hey, I for one would have nothing to say about her if that's all it was. What gets my goat is that she uses his death to advance a far-left and sometimes anti-Semitic agenda that drew endorsements from David Duke and neo-Nazis.

Though she has distanced herself from some of those statements, people who just love her ravings--the anti-American Electronic Iraq website, for example -- were the ones who publicized them in the first place. She didn't lamely disavow her toxic words when people appauded them.

I am sure that Rich has Internet access and can read all the noxious ranting that Sheehan has produced. It doesn't bother him because he agrees with her. He agrees with crap like this, taken directly off not some "pro-Bush blog" but the Electronic Iraq website:

"And the other thing I want him to tell me is 'just what was the noble cause Casey died for?' Was it freedom and democracy? Bullshit! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. We're not freer here, thanks to your PATRIOT Act. Iraq is not free. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."

That's "mainstream" as far as the Frank Rich and the New York Times are concerned. To them, she's not a Gold Star Moron. She's a Mainstream Mama.

UPDATE: The American Thinker makes the following very good point:

Ed Lasky adds:
Notice the whitwashing of the anti-Semitism-swept under the rug. The NYT just cannot report any instances of anti-Semitism (Conyers meeting, this column, Friedman's name-dropping columns involving Saudi princes, etc. ad nauseum.