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beginning with her very personal motivation to rouse the antiwar movement--her loss of her son. It was a PERSONAL campaign. She wanted PERSONAL contact with Bush, to answer her question, "What did he die for?" And in the course of her leadership, her emotion and her anger have never been far from the surface. She has NOT played the politeness games of this cruel and murderous political establishment. She has emphasized being a mother, losing her son, and feeling sorrow for all the other mothers and family members losing their loved ones. HOW can you be polite about that? Really, you can't. She has been both tough and emotional in a good way. She gave us all hope when there was none--in the darkest hours of this war. And, given the personal nature of her campaign--that ripping, bloody wound she feels, and helped us ALL to feel--it is completely understandable that someone calling her an "attention whore" might be the last straw. It might have been easier for her to fixate on that, than to face the collapse of the Democratic Party opposition to the war, and to realize that it has, all along, been as much a Democratic war as a Republican one, and that the political establishment, as a whole, is never going to disavow it, or give up its new foothold in the Middle East. That is the reality. And it is hard to face. And it must be especially hard for HER to face. So she blames DU--an open forum with little control over rude posters, trolls and agents provocateur.
I know other activists who have been daunted by the idiocy of some DU posters. I like the openness of this forum, but it has its downside. Hurting Cindy Sheehan was one of the downsides. How could anyone be so low--on a supposedly progressive Democratic forum? Well, some ARE that low--and they are more than likely not progressives of any kind. And we have to put up with them. The upside is that they sometimes stimulate good discussions (like having a Bushite uncle at the dinner table), and also the openness attracts newly active citizens who are trying to get information and figure things out. I was especially grateful for the original 2004 DU election forum, when discussion of 2004 election fraud was forbidden at other progressive web sites. We had A LOT OF trolls and other kinds of operatives, and, although their naysaying became stupid, rude and tiresome, and their agendas were sometimes quite devious, I would say, on the whole, that it was an eye-opener of a forum, and extremely productive as to activism on election reform.
I don't think it's adequate to say that, if you're going to be a public figure, you must expect abuse. The next step would be to say that, if you're going to lead a civil rights movement, you must expect to be assassinated. Yeah, it's true. Raise your head against fascist forces, and expect the bullets to fly. But let's try not to blame the victim, okay? That troll who called her an "attention whore" stood in for MANY people on the so-called progressive Democratic side who are hypocrites and liars about this war. That's who she has been up against--not just the Bush Junta but the "military-industrial complex" Democrats! And it might as well as have been all them--the Congressional voters for the war, the Congressional voters for more funding for the war, the Congressional voters for non-transparent vote counting by rightwing Bushite electronic voting corporations--who all, collectively, yelled "attention whore" at the mother of a dead soldier in their goddamned bipartisan horror in Iraq.
I think that's who she was reacting to, and can't stomach any more--the Bidens, and the Clintons, and the Dodds, and the McAuliffes and all the liars. And DU produced the troll who summed them all up--who summed up their collective finger in the air at U.S. soldiers and their families, and at the 70% of the American people who hate their war.
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