Andrew Sullivan: No Show (The Bush military funeral canard - fisked)

The New Republic ^ | 12/02/03 | Andrew Sullivan

[Pokey78]

Sullivan ping.

[tallhappy]

Meme? Meme?

There's someone who actually uses this failed attempt to coin a phrase?

[Sloth]

The evidence? That he hasn't attended any military funerals related to the Iraq war. This particular indictment works rhetorically because it manages to sum up a criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy while adding the extra ingredient of damning Bush personally.

It's a complete load of crap. As much as I despise Hillary, I have never understood why O'Reilly and others wanted to criticize her for not going to funerals of 9/11 victims. Hello?! If you had just lost a spouse, would you want Hillary Clinton showing up at the funeral with the Secret Service for a friggin' photo op? Bush should be avoiding funerals for the same reason -- respect for the families.

[GulliverSwift]

I see the ban on media coverage of funerals as both good for the families' privacy as well as stopping support of the terrorists.

The British have a similar ban regarding broadcasting images of IRA members IIRC.

[anoldafvet]

Anybody want to bet that if he did attend the funerals he would be ripped for creating "photo ops" at the expense of grieving families?

[Steve_Seattle]

If Bush doesn't go to funerals, they say it's because he's callous. But if he does go to a funeral (or visit the troops), it's called a cynical photo-op or a "stunt." So either way, his critics will interpret it in a way to suit their negative assessment of him. You can't win.

[Steve_Seattle]

You beat me to the same point; so obviously I agree that's exactly what they'd do, and is in fact what they did about the Iraq trip.

[Freemeorkillme]

BUMP to sound critical thinking.

[Steve_Seattle]

I thought there was a thread a few days ago where someone claimed that Bush HAS met privately with a lot of the victim's families.

[gridlock]

There's a growing anti-Bush meme, pioneered in part by Maureen Dowd and The New York Times...

Allow me.

Rules are rules, after all.

[upchuck]

Meme

From http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=meme ^:

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Sounds like perfect usage to me.

[ravingnutter]

I thought there was a thread a few days ago where someone claimed that Bush HAS met privately with a lot of the victim's families.

I posted this on several threads:

"He never wants to elevate or diminish one sacrifice made over another," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Or, as another White House official put it: "If you're the brother or mother of a soldier who was killed on Saturday, and nothing was said, and then the president says something on Sunday? Unless the president starts saying it for all of them, he can't do it."

So, for now, Bush is continuing to refer as generically as possible to the sacrifice of all, as he did when reporters asked him on Tuesday in California to comment directly on the helicopter attack. "I am saddened any time that there's a loss of life," Bush replied, then added that the soldiers had died "for a cause greater than themselves," which he said was the campaign against terrorism.

Bartlett would not discuss how much concern comments like Wilson's had created at the White House. "The president writes a letter to every family of a fallen soldier, and meets privately with families of soldiers at military bases," Bartlett said. "He grieves with them, he understands. I'm not going to judge anybody's comments made in such a difficult period. People say a lot of things."

People close to the president say that another reason Bush has not been more willing to express more public sympathy for individual soldiers killed in Iraq is his determination to let families have their privacy. Bush was offended, his friends say, about what he saw at times as President Bill Clinton's exploitation of the public's grief for political gain.

Source

[ArGee]

You can't win.

You can win, and our President is winning. All he had to do was change the rules of the game.

As Ann Coulter pointed out so well in her book Treason the left has no concept of actually trying to win a war rather than using the military to distract the public from domestic problems. It is by this "out-of-the-box" thinking that Bush changed the rules of political engagement and left both the press and the left in a tailspin.

Shalom.

[ArGee]

Isn't that Catherine Zeta-Jones?

Although it goes without saying that I'd rather look at her picture than Maureen Dowd's any day.

Shalom.

[js1138]

In what sense failed?

[gridlock]

The rule is that you must post a picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones on each and every Maureen Dowd thread.

Don't ask...

[Helms]

Once created, a virus of the mind gains a life independent of its creator and evolves quickly to infect as many people as possible.

http://www.memecentral.com/vmintro.htm

[Helms]

Sullivan has used the "meme" for some time now. Dowd is running a more minor meme while elite liberals are running a major and virulent meme. Postmodernism for instance
is a real meme and very dangerous. Richard Dawkins first coined the meme and Howard Bloom popularized it.

[tallhappy]

Look at the date: 1976. It's a made up word by liberal academic PC pseudointellectuals.

And, you are wrong. It isn't really used properly by Sullivan, but that is not my point or quibble.

Sullivan is absolutley 100% right about how these specious arguments get passed around. I often will tune to network radio news specificially to hear what the new spin will be.

But using the term meme is like saying "groovy" or some such.

Using such a fake made up term makes him seem like a smarmy rube.