Noemie Emery, writing in the Weekly Standard, launches a grief-seeking missive for those who would exploit grief for political gain.

As Emery explains,

IN THE FOUR YEARS OR so since September 11, liberals have found a new weapon of preference, and that weapon is martyrdom. They have discovered grief as a tactical weapon. They tend to like grief they can use. They use it to arouse guilt and sympathy to cover a highly partisan message, in the hope that while the message may be controversial, the messenger will be sacrosanct and above reproach. Since 9/11, they have embraced this tactic repeatedly, and each time with a common objective: to cripple the war, to denounce the country, to swing an election, but mainly to embarrass and undermine the president.

The strategy has its advantages. Primarily, it gains intense media attention. It frequently enlists unwitting accomplices, the ill-informed or uninformed who rally in sympathy before they find their tender mercies channeled for purposes beyond their intent. They end up suckered, as well demonstrated in Emery’s example of the “memorial service” for Senator Paul Wellstone. This turned into a crassly partisan campaign rally for Walter Mondale, the Democratic contender for Wellsone’s seat, in which Republican mourners were actually told that the best way to honor the death of Wellstone was to ensure the Mondale’s victory.

Note to Grief Activists: your “absolute moral authority” evaporates when you try to use it to force political concessions from your opponents, who may have an equally compelling basis for moral authority of their own. Grief is apolitical, and carries no moral compulsion when cynically tied to a political objective. The horror of 9/11 galvanized Americans of all political walks to rise up and call for Federal action to be taken against Terrorism. Only when political parties then start bickering over the proper response, do political concerns fracture consensus. And that’s when grief becomes irrelevant, and not uniquely in service to any one side or another.

Emery sums up what must be our response to Grief Activists:

Here is a message for our friends in the grief-based community: Really, you must cut this out. We are tired of having our emotions worked on and worked over; tired of the matched sets of dueling relatives, tired of all of these claims on our sympathy, that at the same time defy common sense. The heart breaks for everyone who lost relatives and friends on September 11, as it does for the relatives of the war dead and wounded, as it does for the sons of Paul Wellstone. It does not break for MoveOn.org, Maureen Dowd, and Gail Sheehy, who have not been heartbroken, except by a string of election reverses, and are using the anguish of other people in an effort to turn them around. Especially, it does not break for George Soros, who, after squandering millions on the Kerry campaign, is now using poor Cindy Sheehan to get back in the action, and it does not break for political operative Joe Trippi, late of the Howard Dean meltdown, who is trying to do the same thing. She is now the vehicle for a collection of losers, who will use her, and then toss her over and out once she has served their purposes, or more likely failed to do so. Her family has broken up under the effects of this circus; she has now lost her husband, as well as her son. Please, send her back to her therapist, and what is now left of her broken-up family. And please--do not try this again.

(Via Powerline)

Links: Basil's Blog, Mudville Gazette