Mark Steyn and Marriage

Mark Steyn has worked it all out re: Sheehan: Her failed marriage in lieu of her activism is an appropriate metaphor for the Democratic party.

On unwatched Sunday talk shows, you can still stumble across the occasional sane, responsible Dem. But, in the absence of any serious intellectual attempt to confront their long-term decline, all the energy on the left is with the fringe. The Democratic Party is a coalition of Pat Sheehans and Cindy Sheehans, and the noisier the Cindys get the more estranged the Pats are likely to feel.

Sorry about that, but, if Mrs. Sheehan can insist her son's corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don't see why her marriage can't be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.

Casey Sheehan was a 21-year old man when he enlisted in 2000. He re-enlisted for a second tour, and he died after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City. Mrs. Sheehan says she wishes she'd driven him to Canada, though that's not what he would have wished, and it was his decision.

Steyn drags out a deeply personal metaphor in a direct effort to reduce to irrelevence both the media's coverage over Sheehan and Sheehan's personal motivations and political statements.

Steyn frames his argument against Sheehan by using quotes from appearances Sheehan has made to illustrate her supposed extremist agenda, and by deriding and mocking supporters of Sheehan and sympathizers with Sheehan's perspective. In this passage, which starts a slew of quotes from Sheehan, he attempts to do it all:

I resisted writing about "Mother Sheehan" (as one leftie has proposed designating her), as it seemed obvious that she was at best a little unhinged by grief and at worst mentally ill. It's one thing to mourn a son's death and even to question the cause for which he died, but quite another to roar that he was "murdered by the Bush crime family."

What Steyn actually accomplishes here is the exposure of his own bias. Steyn shows how much he abhorred and dismissed Sheehan before he even thought about her. He, essentially, dismissed her outright, a "left wing lunatic" not worth the graceful pressure of his mighty pen to fall upon her. It is an interesting point, really: as he hesitates and denigrades Sheehan for her personal fallability [indeed, who is to say that anybody's marriage would stay intact in circumstances such as these?], he mirrors Bush's reluctance in dealing with Sheehan. Perhaps Steyn's magic pen could have produced such an idologic blockade as to prevent Sheehan's story from catching flame as much as it has.

First impressions are always the most treasured; and it's impressive to see a man such as Mark Steyn expose just how much derision he has from anybody who presents themselves as an opposite to his point of view, upon soley the first impression.

From Steyn's early-Invasion interview over at Right Wing News:

John Hawkins: Do you think we would have been better off if we would have invaded Iraq this summer instead of waiting this long?

Mark Steyn: Yes. The time lost has emboldened America's enemies - I use the term elastically - from the peace movement, which is a little less of a joke today than it was last spring, to Jacques Chirac to Kim Jong-Il. John Podhoretz keeps writing these columns in The New York Post congratulating Bush on one tremendous victory after another - over Tom Daschle, over Kofi Annan, over Dominique de Villepin. But these are not the enemy, they're just speed-bumps on the way to the enemy, and they should all have been left receding into the distance in the rear-view mirror a long time ago.

John Hawkins: Hypothetically, let's say that somehow, someway, George Bush were convinced not to invade Iraq and were to promise not to invade any other nation during the war on terrorism. What do you think the consequences of that would be?

Mark Steyn: He'd be a one-term President, and the death of the west would be pretty much a certainty. In hard terms, the best reason to hang Saddam is pour encourager les autres. Similarly, if he gets off, the North Koreans and Syrians and the more devious princes in the House of Saud will draw entirely reasonable conclusions about their freedom to operate.

John Hawkins: If we invade Iraq without getting UN approval, what do you think the consequences will be for the United Nations?

Mark Steyn: The UN will survive but it will be greatly diminished, which will be a good thing. I don't want it involved in the war, or in the post-war reconstruction.

Democrats are inherently weak, waffling middling fools who are reactive and unreasonable; Bush-style Conservatives need to be extreme, aggressive, brutalist, exclusionary. This is Steyn's world, one in which there is no alternative point of view. This world is indicative of the right- use a skewed version of Enlightenment era justification of "Reason" when it comes to being a political conservative in order to push your enemy to "Unreason, irrationality." And yet, the right also clings to pre-enlightenment priciples of social morality [such as their consistent homophobia] and justice.

And Steyn, the bringer of all things reasonable and justified, refuses to even consider Sheehan. Some would suggest that Steyn feels threatened: not only has somebody been more powerful at pushing her agenda onto the front page of the newspaper, but that person is a woman, with personal investment and personal loss in a war he deeply supports, and that person is politically his opposite. She is nothing but a threat to him.