Exploiting The War Dead

As the Cindy Sheehan bandwagon grows, it grows more troubling. Heartfelt sympathizers and routine political activists are to be expected. But candidates for Congress? (AP report) That is political grandstanding of the worst sort.

Now joining Sheehan outside the Bush ranch is Coleen Rowley, a Dem former FBI whistle-blower who's running for Congress in liberal Minnesota against Rep. John Kline. Rowley's platform is pretty much "stop the war." This is from her announcement speech:

The overreaching peaked with the Administration's pre-emptive strike upon Iraq, which was deceptively sold to American citizens as the necessary "shock and awe" response to the Al Qaeda attacks. But there was no link whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Documentary evidence has now turned up, in the form of Britain's Downing Street memos among other things, which shows that the intelligence was fixed around the Bush Administration's pre-set plans to invade Iraq. And now the war and U.S. occupation has turned Iraq into the very thing we sought to eliminate: a new breeding ground for terrorists. The situation in Iraq continues to degenerate daily.

Faced with a tough battle, since she's been a Dem for about six minutes and actually voted for Kline last time around, she needs money. And she's not going to get enough of it in Minnesota. Says Minn. State political science prof Joe Kunkel:

"She's not going to be just the run-of-the-mill challenger. I think that's going to give her a national base from which to raise funds. So, from that respect she'll probably be a stronger candidate than others that come up."

Her fundraising off to a slow start, Rowley went looking for those national dollars. What better way to do it than to latch onto a radical lefty who's dishonerably leveraging her son's honorable death? So off Rowley goes to Texas, where the TV cameras are.

And they'll lap her up. Hopefully, that'll just anger anyone with a sense of decency in the Second Congressional District of Minnesota. It sure should.

Update: This story is close to Minnesotan Capt. Ed. Here's his say:

Sheehan lost her son and appears to have gone seriously off-balance with grief. Lourey has also lost a son. Rowley has no excuse, and Minnesotans will demand to know why she went out of her way to leech off of Sheehan's publicity to align herself with the most virulent band of America-haters seen since the last election. She must really miss the media attention she got from her 15 minutes of fame for pointing out that the FBI ignored Zacarias Moussaoui, in part because of tenderness over his Arabic ethnicity.

Minnesota went blue in the last election, but they didn't go ultraviolet. Minnesotans will want an accounting from both politicians as to their support for the vile rhetoric coming from Camp Casey in the next election cycle. Rowley will soon learn that in politics, not all publicity is helpful.