Fit To Print

Gnarls Barkley

August 16th, 2006

What do Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney and Hugo Chavez all have in common? They’re card-carrying members of Club Crazy. Or not.

First, a little unimportant background: In my exhaustive search of a handful of google links I came across a couple articles by The Guardian’s Greg Palast. Turns out that hack had written a piece on McKinney and one on Chavez saying exactly the same stuff I’m talking about. Poorly written, but let’s face it, I had no intention of writing this post any other way than poorly. Point is, this isn’t exactly groundbreaking, uncharted territory. Nevertheless, my journey continues.

One of the problems contributing to the condemnation of said individuals is our own willingness to form split-second opinions based on limited tv snippets, soundbites and maybe some anecdotal evidence garnered from all of one source. Now, just out of necessity and limited hours in the day, we make assessments like these all the time. And usually, if it looks like it, tastes like it and smells like it, it’s a good thing we didn’t step in it. But when looking at our political leaders, the ramifications of these evaluations get bigger, commensurate with the effort exerted to sway our opinion by interested parties, and this is when we need to withhold reflexive judgments.

The easiest of these three cases is Cindy Sheehan. Youtube up a few clips of her. Check out some of her posts on Huffington’s site. Not crazy. In interviews she is patient, calm, focused, sweet, even. She doesn’t like our president. She doesn’t like the war. She loves every human being from here to Baghdad. Fair Enough.

She gets a little bit angrier in her writing. Even there, all we see is that the woman is adamantly opposed to a lot of the idiotic policies of this administration, does a good job of explaining this, and thus gets a pass. She also has the whole Gandhi revival thing going on, with the fasting and the mentions of nonviolent resistance. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems a little forced. Bottom line, she’s a good gal to have around. Not really even that extremist.

By the by, this is a three-part series. Like the Lord of the Rings. To give our poor reader some much needed rest and time for recovery. Thank you for your continuing patronage.

Entry Filed under: Politics