There was once a bumper sticker that read, “My mother is a travel agent–she specializes in guilt trips.”
Mother Sheehan (as the left decreed calling her–an allusion to Brecht’s Mother Courage?) is trying to take the whole nation on a guilt trip.
Sheehan is but the latest manifestation of the left’s new ploy: guilt trips as a political tool. Weekly Standard contributing editor Noemie Emery looks into the phenomenon in a must-read piece headlined “Speak of the Dead:”
“[T]his is the unspoken theme of grief-centered politics: We are suffering, so you owe it to us to give us what we ask for. This is the claim of Cindy Sheehan and the Jersey Girls, and it carries with it an implied accusation: If you don’t do what we ask you, you don’t care that our loved one is dead.”
Whether it’s Paul Wellstone funeral (which turned into a political rally) or the Jersey Girls, a group of anti-Bush 9/11 widows who became protégés of magazine writer Gail Sheehy, or Mother Sheehan, grief-centered politics has a way of turning against its own.
Emery advises:
“Lesson to liberals: Grief-centered politics has to be subtle. It’s a lesson they haven’t quite learned.”