(Not really a rant at all, but a concise answer to the “Oh yeah, well what about Haliburton?” Boobs)

I want to try out a new feature on my blog: The Week’s Best Rant. To inaugurate this feature, I want to introduce my inspiration, a wonderful piece of commentary by “Next93,” who posted a comment in response to a post on the Riding Sun blog.

By way on introduction, many in the liberal media (to differentiate from media of other political persuasions) have been hyping the Cindy Sheehan story. This coverage almost without exception leaves out important details or explanation of what is really going on, which I’ve reinserted in parentheses for clarity.

These reports emphasize that the President will not meet with her (again), so she can explain to him her grief (publicly harangue him with media present), and he can explain why her son’s death was necessary (hang his head in complete submission to her absolute moral authority), so that she can make peace with her loss. (Sign book and movie deals and parlay this gig into a permanent money-maker as chief PR Rep for radical isolationists, the ones who see no evil unless it’s Jewish).

In ongoing commentary at Riding Sun, several commenters remained true to form, snidely dismissing President Bush’s response to families who have lost Soliders in Iraq, his lack of compassion specifically for Sheehan and others like her, his August vacation, etc. In response to replies that the President makes a regular (non-publicized) habit of seeing grieving families, these too are dismissed as “production line” events. Here’s where we pick up a response by Next93:

“…You have a man who goes out of his way (production-line or not) to meet with bereaved families and look them in the eye, knowing that it was his decision that put their loved ones into harm's way.

“You can try to glibly toss this off with another tired reference to Haliburton, or you can try to think like a parent for a moment and consider how hard it must be on him as a father himself. Three minutes in this situation probably feels like five-to-life. Yet it's something that he does because (and only because) he feels that he owes it to these families.

“The amazing thing to me is that you "nuanced" people just can't see past your own anger about the last two elections long enough to see what's at stake. You're so caught up in not loosing an argument that you refuse to see what you're arguing FOR. So you raise an endless stream of red herrings like Haliburton (yes, dammit, they’re making a profit! Get over it!), so that you don't have to address whether it's right to fight and die to prevent 1/4 of the world's population from falling into the hands of a movement that wants to turn its back on the last 700 years of human progress. You complain about human rights abuses in Abu Graib and refuse to consider whether it's an improvement over the 184,000 (and I did get THAT statistic right!) Kurds who went "missing" under the former regime. “

And Next93 is just warming up. Because of their irrational hatred of the President, and in their eyes, his reverse Midas touch, they can’t even see that the moral grounds of their dissent have shifted 180 degrees, and they’re actually fighting on behalf of dictators and terrorists the world over. No matter, those things are all Bush’s fault too!

Next93’s rant ends with a stunning takeaway:

As long as I can remember, people like you have been bitching about the dictators the US propped up during the cold war. Now we've taken out one of the worst, and your primary concern seems to be that the wrong party will get credit for doing it. You've fought for the last 50 years for civil rights for people of color, and 30 years for women's rights, and now you're siding with people who are supporting genocide in Africa, consider Hindus a waste of skin, and view women as property. You claim to be a progressive, but you think that the Iraqis should be abandoned to a legal system that makes Nazi show-trials look like the Hague. You claim to be grieving over the loss of American soldiers, but you cynically trade on the loss of one woman’s son in order to advocate a cut-and-run policy that will make his death and all the other deaths completely meaningless. You claim to be a patriot, but you advance a policy that you know will only enable further terrorists attacks on an America viewed as too timid to defend itself.

Next93, proud recipient of Dadmanly’s First Ever Rant of the Week.

Links: Dawn Patrol at Mudville Gazette, Basil's Blog, Liberty Call at the Indepundit, Northern 'burbs Blog