One Mother's Son

Frank Rich has a good column today; his opinion is that the attempted " Swift Boating" of Cindy Sheehan failed. And that this is a sign of the growing unease of the American people with regard to the war.

I hope he's right. But the thing that jumped out at me, and why I'm linking to it even though I can imagine some of you have had your fill of Ms. Sheehan (agree with the way she's done what she's done or not) is this:

Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't exist."

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote.

Again, this may be the one single thing that I find most loathesome about Geprge W. Bush. It's not that he's an incompetent. It's not that he's a liar. It's that he doesn't even seem to be serious about the things he's incompetent at and lies about.

The man makes jokes about sending men and women to their deaths. And that's not funny.

I believe just about anything can be funny in the right context, but a Commander-In-Chief cracking wise, in public, about decisions that cost the lives of American soldiers? That's not funny. That's not funny at all.