Wow. The mind boggles. One the one hand you have an adult man who not only volunteers with the military, but reups when his tour of duty is finished. On the other, you have a brain-damaged woman killed by the state by dehydration because her husband claimed for the first time after receiving a huge settlement for her injury that years ago she casually remarked in passing that she wouldn't want to be kept alive in that state.

Obviously exactly the same!

On the one hand you have two parents trying desperately for years to get publicity for their case to keep their daughter from being killed by the state, whose personal statements were always restrained and measured (although the same could not be said about some of their supporters). On the other hand, you have a mother whose son was killed over a year ago by our enemies, a mother who already met with the President with the same protocol as other military families, who is demanding special treatment, airing bigoted conspiracy theories, and saying the following about the man she wants to meet with her:

So anyway that filth-spewer and warmonger, George Bush was speaking after the tragedy of the marines in Ohio, he said a couple things that outraged me.

. . . So, as many of you have heard, and I didn’t mean to cause any problems with the convention, but I was writing an email to everybody, and I was so mad, like I said, and I just had this brainstorm, I’m going to Dallas, I don’t know where Crawford is. I’ve been in Texas, Casey was stationed at Fort Hood. I drove from northern California to Fort Hood one time, it took like, 30 hours. And I thought, I could be driving for days to get from Dallas to Crawford! But I don’t care, I’m goin’. And I’m gonna tell them, “You get that evil maniac out here, cuz a Gold Star Mother, somebody who’s blood is on his hands, has some questions for him." . . . That lying bastard, George Bush, is taking a five-week vacation in time of war . . . You get that maniac out here to talk with me in person.”

Obviously exactly the same!

The advocates for the Schindlers, and sometimes Terri's siblings themselves, chose a full bore media smear campaign against an innocent, private individual trying to make the best decisions for his family.

Um, I think they were family too, and the behavior of Michael Schiavo and his lawyer towards the Schindlers left a lot to be desired.

Then he rehashes many of the antiwar arguments that I and others have spent countless hours refuting over and over and over and over for the past three years.

Advocates for Cindy Sheehan have directed their attack against the person who sought and gained the highest public office in the land, who sets policy for the entire nation, and who voluntarily took our nation to an aggressive war . . . Perhaps he thought he was making the "best decision" for America, but even then he also took it upon himself to make decisions for tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families, too. . . . Bush and the neocons voluntarily chose the public role of bringing death where it was not asked for.

Death for Saddam and his henchmen was asked for repeatedly by Iraqis who were able to get out of Saddam's police state, and approved by the majority of the Iraqi population in every poll taken since the end of the war up to today (a separate issue from how well they think the reconstruction is going). But how would this guy know that, since none of the antiwar marches of the past three years let Iraqis speak?

But it doesn't end there.

Finally, Casey's dignity is quite intact. The images we see put forward by Sheehan and her allies are, when they feature him at all, of Casey as he was when they were proudest of him. While this goes on, he is quite dead, not languishing in a persistent vegetative state, imprisoned in his own body, while the media constantly flashes images of his crippled body and his vacant facial expressions.

Where to start? Many disability activists would disagree with you about Terri Schiavo's dignity, and while I think Cindy Sheehan's use of her son's memory can't tarnish his dignity, that doesn't seem to be one of her prime concerns.

. . . demonstrators are camped out in the brush outside a Texas ranch, not in the parking lot of a hospice care center, where Terri and Michael can find no privacy, and where others trying to visit dying loved ones have to make their way through a three ring circus to reach their bed.

Yes, the Schiavo media circus inconvenienced other families visiting loved ones at the hospice, and that's a shame. And Cindy's media circus is inconveniencing Crawford residents. I would call that one a draw.

UPDATE: More thoughtful restrained statements from Cindy Sheehan:

I do this for all of our brave souls (American or Iraqi) who have been murdered by the Bush crime family.
I told my Congressman that he needs to speak out against the lies and murder, because I am going to...when George Bush killed my son, they finally killed the wrong person.
If anything I do can shorten the war by one minute or save one life, or bring discredit to the evil bastards in the administration, my life will have been worthwhile..and Casey's sacrifice meaningful . . .

Yes, that's exactly like how the Schindlers talked about Michael Schiavo. . . . (via the Corner)