I must therefore conclude that America needs to eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's, cry, get drunk, call her sister, pass out, and feel better tomorrow

HuffPo has an exclusive piece by Cindy Sheehan:

People have asked what it is I want to say to President Bush. Well, my message is a simple one. He’s said that my son -- and the other children we’ve lost -- died for a noble cause. I want to find out what that noble cause is. And I want to ask him: “If it’s such a noble cause, have you asked your daughters to enlist? Have you encouraged them to go take the place of soldiers who are on their third tour of duty?” I also want him to stop using my son’s name tojustify the war. The idea that we have to “complete the mission” in Iraq to honor Casey’s sacrifice is, to me, a sacrilege to my son’s name. Besides, does the president any longer even know what “the mission” really is over there?...

...Casey knew that the war was wrong from the beginning. But he felt it was his duty to go, that his buddies were going, and that he had no choice. The people who send our young, honorable, brave soldiers to die in this war, have no skin in the game. They don’t have any loved ones in harm’s way. As for people like O’Reilly and Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh and all the others who are attacking me and parroting the administration line that we must complete the mission there -- they don’t have one thing at stake. They don’t suffer through sleepless nights worrying about their loved ones.

See, that's the great thing about all those right-wing hypocrites, is that they're so obviously, well, hypocrites. Not just because they trumpet a cause that they will not personally sacrifice for. Hell, we all do that, right? I mean, how many of us lined up for duty in the Balkans, or Rwanda, or Somalia, or any other place where perfect storms of greed and prejudice and well, fucking evil have touched down and torn the joint apart? No, they are hypocrites because they seek to deify the U.S. soldier and his sacrificing loved ones, except when those same people disagree with them, and then the Cindy Sheehans of the world are no better than any other of the liberal traitors they abhor.

Because the point has never been that Iraq and the rest of the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein. The point is, at what cost? At what cost do we do this for Iraq? And can it ever be truly successful, if we do it FOR them?

I don't deny that women were imprisoned and raped and tortured in Iraq under Saddam's regime. It's unspeakably horrible. But if you look at how many women in Iraq were brutalized by Saddam, his sons and henchmen, and then look at how many women in the country now stand on the brink of systematic government disenfranchisement and oppression... How much better will they fare in an Islamic state, overall? And is that OUR government, making that call? Really? Well, how fucking dare we?

And, then, the whole issue of military adventures like this making us a bigger target for terrorists, well, that's just common sense, now, isn't it?

When have we ever been more hated in the world than we are right now? Hell, I hate us, and I fucking live here.

Just kidding. God forbid I should play into the hands of the freepers and actually proclaim my hatred for America. Except I do kinda hate us. The same way I hate myself when I've bullied someone weaker to get what I want. Or when I've lied about a situation so that I can do things my own way. Or when I didn't do the right thing, because I was afraid of being criticized or mocked. How I feel about my country right now is the same way I feel when, steeped in my own moral cowardice and dubiousness, I stand before my bedroom mirror and indict my own reflection thusly:

"You suck. I hate you."