Cry baby cry

Over the last nine Salon has crept leftwards, but this piece published yesterday represents the nadir of political journalism. In "The Hollow Men," Robert Bryce castigates George W. Bush for his "inability to feel pain for others" - a criticism resulting from Bush's refusal to see Cindy Sheehan. Fine, I accept that. But then comes this whopper: Lyndon Johnson, responsible for another unpopular war, deserved more credit for feeling soldiers' pain. He writes:

Johnson felt the ruin that came with the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. And he was devastated by it. In early 1968, according to Nick Kotz's magnificent book, "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America," the war in Vietnam was going from bad to worse. "Since the Tet offensive had begun the previous month, five hundred American soldiers were dying every week. Often, late at night, the president would go down to the White House Situation Room to check on casualty reports. At times, when Johnson sat with visitors in the Oval Office, he would weep openly as he read from the previous day's casualty lists."

No doubt Stalin cried too when he had his son executed. Or, to use a better analogy, Wilson did too when he sent American soliders to fight a European war which he pushed and cudgeled and bludgeoned the Senate to declare: a war we had no business fighting. Bryce omits any mention of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, of course. It gets better:

W. doesn't do human rights. He doesn't do casualty lists. Nor, apparently, does he cry. And as noted by author James Moore, that's what makes Sheehan such a powerful figure. Sheehan has rendered the complexities and carnage of the war into a simple question: Are you on the side of a grieving mother of a dead soldier? Or are you on the side of a president who continues to insist that this war is, in some way, noble?

Let's forget the slovenly grammar of that first sentence. So if you're not on "the side" of a grieving mother -- what kind of side are they on? they're grieving! -- then you're a heartless autocrat who sends troops to die?

Look, I've reached my own nadir regarding my support for the Iraq war. I can list five reasons why it's failed. But to draw an analogy between the Bush administration's almost moronic failure to conduct a war and the president's inability (or reluctance) to shed tears (which would have been maudlin and sententious anyway) is rubbish.