Contained in an interview in which the Marxist/capitalist (or is it the other way around?) actor griped about losing half of everything he has in his divorce is an unwarranted slap in the face to Hugo Chavez:

“Let’s face it,” [Penn] declared, “I’m a person that feels pretty alienated from the rest of the world and never felt understood by anyone.”

How quickly he forgets:

You’d at least think this would have made Sean feel understood by someone this week:

(Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sought to end a diplomatic stand-off with the United States on Tuesday by suggesting it name Bill Clinton, actor Sean Penn or director Oliver Stone as its envoy to Caracas.

“Never felt understood by anyone”? Hugo must be heartbroken.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Today’s poster-boy for Thorazine is a frequent guest in the leftist Cuckoo’s Nest: actor Sean Penn.

In a piece at the Huffington Post published yesterday, Sean Penn rode to the rescue of his pal Hugo Chavez, defending the Venezuelan dictator against his American critics like a knight in clueless armor:

I know President Chavez well. Whether or not one agrees with all his policies, what is certainly true of Chavez is that he is a warm and friendly man with a robust sense of humor (who daily risks his own life for his country in ways Dick Cheney could never imagine). To treat such a man coldly is akin to spitting on him. As a country we’ve done enough of that.

Say what you will, but it has only resulted in the self-celebration of our smirking spitters, while costing us international respect, American lives, and left wounds in the hands of our children’s future. The Cheneys, down to the O’Reillys and Hannitys and Limbaughs, effectively hate the principles upon which we were founded. They are among the greatest cowards in all of American history.

Sean’s defending an outspoken, anti-American communist dictator from certain Americans because they hate the principles upon which America was founded? Nothing can better confirm your lucidity, or hone your sense of humor for that matter, that watching a wealthy American actor defending a man who, if in power in this country, would put a fast clamp on the “artistic freedom” of Sean Penn and his vacuous pals. And the Hollywood Left has the gall to call black Republicans “self loathing”?

Whenever I see Penn, Glover, Belafonte, Spacey, et al, sucking up to anti-American, anti-capitalist thugs, goons, tinpots and despots I can’t help but think of the giddy minions boarding the spaceship at the end of the “To Serve Man” episode of the Twilight Zone. It’s a cookbook, Sean!

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Hollywood left is that, even though they have more money than brains, most have never been quite stupid enough to move to a country that practices what they preach. But why should they when it might be coming to them?

You can learn all about Penn’s special friendship with Hugo Chavez in Sean’s upcoming sequel:

And don’t forget to catch Sean co-starring in an upcoming Three Stooges movie:

It’s that time of year again when they flock to the French Riviera for the Cannes Film Festival.

Sean Penn opened up the circus with a Spicoli-esque rant about Barack Obama. Actress Natalie Portman served as arm/eye candy and a mob of pandas appeared to lighten things up.

Mon dieu!

At a press conference beforehand, the actor, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, offered his views on the Democratic nomination race.

Asked if he would be joining other Hollywood A-listers in pledging support for Obama, Penn gave him a less than ringing endorsement and warned that he has an awful lot to live up to.

”I don’t have a candidate I’m supporting and I’m certainly interested and excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” he said, but went on to accuse him of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record.

”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be,” Penn said. “This is the most important election, certainly in my lifetime, and maybe ever.”

What is Sean Penn smoking? I mean, what else is he smoking?

Ah, never mind.

Eric at Classical Values attempts to deconstruct the un-deconstruct-ible.

LGF has video shot at a different angle. The SFSU Republicans blog is here.

Next time, bring a “Nitwit” sign, too:

Sen. Patty Murray and Congressman Jay Inslee are lobbying legislators to cancel this week’s hearing on a resolution calling on Congress to investigate and consider impeaching President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Inslee and Murray, both Democrats who voted against the war, think state lawmakers holding hearings and voting on impeachment is a distraction from what Democrats are doing in Congress, including their efforts to end the war.

…”Jay called and he said, ‘Darlene, don’t do this,’” said Sen. Darlene Fairley, D-Lake Forest Park. She is chairwoman of the Senate Government Operations and Elections Committee, which is scheduled to hold a hearing on two measures Thursday. One is Sen. Eric Oemig’s joint memorial calling for Congress to investigate and consider impeachment of Bush and Cheney. The other is Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles’ measure opposing Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

“I said, ‘Jay it’s all over YouTube. I can’t un-ring that bell,’” Fairley said. There are a number of videos posted to the site featuring Oemig and the impeachment measure….

…The hearing at 3:30 p.m. Thursday is looking to be a major spectacle. The Washington Legislature’s anti-Bush moves have become, at least temporarily, a center of attention of anti-war forces around the country. At an impeachment forum in Olympia last week where Oemig spoke, according to reports, the audience included Rachel Corrie’s parents, Lt. Ehren Watada and James Yee.

Coming to Olympia to testify in favor of Oemig’s impeachment resolution are Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, a growing voice in the anti-war movement, and Mary Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel who resigned from the U.S. State Department in 2003 to protest the invasion of Iraq. She has since worked closely with Cindy Sheehan and others in the peace movement.

Kohl-Welles told me she invited retired Chairman of the Joint Chief Gen. John Shalikashvili, who lives near Gig Harbor, and actor and activist Sean Penn. She said she was waiting to hear back from Penn’s publicist.

The hearing is turning into just what Democrats in Congress worry about.

Yep. More on that in today’s Washington Post, which has a parallel article on the Dems’ Murtha headache.

***

Dan Riehl has background on the impeachment drive.

Just in tonight from Ft. Lewis via the Seattle P-I:

The court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada ended in a mistrial Wednesday.

The case’s judge, Lt. Col. John Head, declared the trial over after a day of wrangling over a stipulation of facts that Watada had signed before the trial and that would have been part of the instructions to the jury. The judge decided that Watada never intended when he signed the stipulation to mean that he had a duty to go to Iraq with his unit.

Again the issue was Watada’s views on the Iraq war — opinions that kept him from going with his unit to the conflict and that the judge didn’t want brought up at the court-martial.

Watada, a Stryker Brigade soldier, is the first commissioned officer to refuse to be deployed to Iraq. Watada’s unit left this sprawling base for Iraq in June, but Watada remained behind. He said he believes the war is illegal and that his duty is to not abide by illegal orders.

But Head tried to keep the court-martial from becoming a tribunal on the war and its legality and has ruled that Watada’s attorney cannot present witnesses to question the war’s legality. Outside the base, that has been the issue as peace activists from across the country have rallied to Watada’s side.

Watada is charged with missing movement to Iraq and with two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer. Those last two charges result from statements Watada made against the war in a video tape released to reporters after he made his refusal to go to Iraq public and to a Veterans for Peace convention at the University of Washington.

He had been charged with two other counts of conduct unbecoming for interviews he gave. Prosecutors dropped those charged in return for Watada’s signing a stipulation that he had given the interviews. He also acknowledged in the stipulation that he didn’t go with his unit to Iraq, though he didn’t admit his guilt to the missing movement charge…

… “I see there is an inconsistency in the stipulation of fact,” the judge said Wednesday. “I don’t know how I can accept (it) as we stand here now.”

Because much of the Army’s evidence was laid out in the document, rejecting it would hurt its case, Head acknowledged. He granted the prosecutors’ request for a mistrial, which Watada’s lawyer opposed.

Seattle Times has more:

Head said the prosecutors could move to reopen their case which had already been completed on Tuesday. However, they declined to reopen the case, which would have been complicated by the jury already seeing the agreement that now had problems.

Instead, the prosecution moved for a mistrial which the judge then granted and tentatively scheduled a trial for mid-March.

In a new trial, Watada, 28, could face up to six years in prison if convicted of all the charges against him.

Watada and his cheerleaders are the subject of my column today, reprinted here with links.

***

Angry, left-wing Washington Post blogger William Arkin considers American troops in Iraq who believe in their mission “mercenaries” who are “naive” and should be thankful they haven’t been spit upon yet. Curdled Democrat Sen. John Kerry thinks those soldiers, who volunteer for service, didn’t “make an effort to be smart” and are “stuck in Iraq” because of their intellectual deficiencies. At the last anti-war spasm in Washington, liberal peace-lovers vandalized a military recruitment office — repeating an act of destruction taken by rock-wielding thugs across college campuses and at ROTC headquarters nationwide.

So, who inspires these troop-bashers? Whose courage do they cheer? Whom do they call “hero”?

Not the American soldier on the battlefield, willingly and freely putting his life on the line for his beliefs, his family, our country, security and freedom.

No, their idea of a military hero is Army Lt. Ehren Watada. Did Watada take a bullet for his comrades? Rescue innocent civilians from insurgent forces? Throw himself on a grenade? Ambush a terrorist sniper nest? No.

Watada’s the soldier who went on trial this week for defying orders to be deployed to Iraq — after volunteering for duty. For those deficient in English, here’s the meaning of volunteer: “To perform or offer to perform a service of one’s own free will.” Hundreds of anti-war groupies, including actor Sean Penn, showed up to cheer Watada.

Watada was scheduled to leave Fort Lewis, Wash., for his first tour of duty in Iraq last summer. Instead of getting on the bus with his fellow soldiers, he announced he would not go and denounced the war as “unjust” and “illegal.” He was the only military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq with Fort Lewis’ 4,000-member Stryker Brigade. The anti-war propaganda machine kicked into full gear for Watada, with coordinated press conferences in Tacoma, Wash., and Honolulu, where Watada grew up.

Some of Watada’s hometown neighbors are sick of his intellectual disingenuousness. Writing in Watada’s hometown newspaper, the Honolulu Advertiser, retired Col. Thomas D. Farrell, who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005-2006, retorted:

“How can anyone seriously claim that our military involvement in Iraq is illegal when both Congress and the U.N. have taken the steps to authorize it, and allow it to continue to this day? Lt. Watada argues that he has the right to make his own personal assessment, notwithstanding whatever Congress and the U.N. may do. If he’s right, why not make our personal assessments about how fast is safe to drive, or how much tax is our fair share? The answer is obvious: Anarchy would prevail, and the rule of law — the basis of all real freedom — would cease to exist.”

The only thing illegal here is Watada’s willful refusal to obey orders. Watada is just the latest in a line of losers abandoning their men, their mission and the rule of law. The left calls this “dissent.” The rest of us call it what it is: Desertion.

Many military observers say they smelled a rat when they first heard of Watada’s story. Watada graduated from Hawai’i Pacific University in 2003, joined the Army shortly after, went to Officer Candidate School and incurred a three-year obligation. Wrote Navy Officer Robert Webster:

“This guy graduated from college and then joined the Army, going to Officer Candidate school, after we had already started the Iraq campaign just to claim it was an ‘illegal’ war when his unit is called to go. Smells funny to me. In my mind, either the Army gave a commission to an idiot not aware of current events or he planned this all along.”

Soldiers making calculated political statements against their own troops?

Wouldn’t be the first time — cough, cough, John Kerry. Idiot or schemer, Watada deserves a stiff, strong penalty for his lawlessness. An excellent proposal put forth at the military blog Op-For:

“Relieve him of operational duties and send him to work at Walter Reed, to handle the in- and out-processing of wounded veterans.”

Yes, where the real heroes are.

***
Previous:

A deserter, not a “dissenter”
Hakuna Watada
Anti-American idol Ehren Watada

October 5 – Day of Mass Resistance

On October 5, people everywhere will walk out of school, take off work, and come to the downtowns & townsquares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to join us – making a powerful statement: “NO! THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US! AND WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!”

Isn’t that what elections are for?

Last year’s parade was a dud. But it’s always a good excuse to trot out a giant peaceful poster of Bush decapitated.

Among the celebrity participants:

Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler created a poetic masterpiece for the occasion titled “FIRE HIS ASS.” An instant classic.

Left-wing actor Mark Ruffalo standing in for Baghdad Sean Penn (click to watch the video).

And C-list rapper Boots Riley (listen here)–last seen on an album cover prancing in front of the burning World Trade Center with a bomb detonator.

Amid the swirl of the political scandal du jour in Washington, these BDS events are always clarifying.

***

Guess which members of Congress will be marching with the moonbats tomorrow?

Reader Andrew G.:

Do the moonbats have any reconition of the irony of their slogan “The World Can’t Wait”, given that it’s the fifth annual “Drive out the Bush Regime” event?

Cam Edwards of OnTap e-mailed me yesterday with an excellent idea–a rally for Abdul Rahman outside the Afghan embassy in Washington, D.C. Thanks to the D.C. Freepers, a permit has been submitted to the D.C. police.

Cam reports:

The way it works is the D.C. Police only contact you if there’s a problem. As of now, there’s been no contact by the police, so it looks like the rally is a go.

Please join us if you can (and if you can’t, why not organize an event/prayer service/etc. in your own neighborhood?):

Friday March 24
Noon to 1pm
Outside the Afghan Embassy
2341 Wyoming Ave NW.
Washington DC

More action items at Freedom’s Zone.

Mark Tapscott:

Where are Hollywood and the Glitterati? Where are Barbara Streisand? Where is Cindy Sheehan? George Clooney? Sean Penn? All the rest of the intellectual elite of the entertainment world who think it their inherent right to instruct the rest of us on the virtues of tolerating everything from porn to persecution? Everything except the simple faith of one Christian man standing by himself in a Muslim nation.

lWhere are Barry Lynn and Americans United for Separation of Church and State? Where are the leaders of the liberal mainline Protestant Denominations and the National Council of Churches?

The silence of these people is truly deafening.

And where are the Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders challenging their flocks to candlelight vigils, protests and prayers on behalf of Rahman? Will America’s Christians stand by like Saul of Tarsus to hold the coats of those slaughtering this brave man of Afghanistan?

***

Question: Will the “moderates” at CAIR come to support Rahman?

Update: Well, well…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CAIR CALLS FOR RELEASE OF AFGHAN CHRISTIAN
Islamic civil rights group says conversion a personal, not state matter

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 3/22/2006) – A prominent national Islamic civil
rights and advocacy group today called on the government of Afghanistan
to release Abdul Rahman, a man facing the death penalty for converting
from Islam to Christianity.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says
the man’s conversion is a personal matter not subject to the
intervention of the state.

***

In case you missed it below, here was President Bush’s tepid statement earlier today about Rahman’s plight:

I’m troubled when I hear, deeply troubled when I hear, the fact that a person who has converted away from Islam may be held to account. That’s not the universal application of the values that I talked about. I look forward to working with the government of that country to make sure that people are protected in their capacity to worship.

“Held to account?”

What the…???

***

Here’s an excerpt from my syndicated column today:

During his extensive White House press conference on the War on Terror and the defense of freedom overseas, Bush spent plenty of time describing what life was like for Afghanis before Operation Enduring Freedom:

“There was no such thing as religious freedom. There was no such thing as being able to express yourself in the public square. There was no such thing as press conferences like this. They were totalitarian in their view. And that would be — I’m referring to the Taliban, of course. And that’s how they would like to run government. They rule by intimidation and fear, by death and destruction. And the United States of America must take this threat seriously and must not — must never forget the natural rights that formed our country.”

President Bush, who will defend Abdul Rahman’s natural rights from being usurped and terminated by Afghanistan’s Islamic executioners?

Some observers are taking comfort in the news that Rahman may be declared mentally unfit in order to allow Afghan president Hamid Karzai to save face. But Rahman is apparently not alone. Compass Direct, a Christian news agency, reports (hat tip: reader Faith M.):

During the past few days, Compass has confirmed the arrest of two other Afghan Christians elsewhere in the country. Because of the sensitive situation, local sources requested that the location of the jailed converts be withheld. This past weekend, one young Afghan convert to Christianity was beaten severely outside his home by a group of six men, who finally knocked him unconscious with a hard blow to his temple. He woke up in the hospital two hours later but was discharged before morning. “Our brother remains steadfast, despite the ostracism and beatings,” one of his friends said.

Several other Afghan Christians have been subjected to police raids on their homes and places of work in the past month, as well as to telephone threats.

Are they crazy, too?

More: Christians in Afghanistan

ICC report on Christians in Afghanistan

More on secret Christians.

Robert Spencer: Abdul Rahman – On trial for freedom. Excerpt:

he Islamic death penalty for apostasy was not invented either by Karzai or Mullah Omar. It is as old as the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s command that “if somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him” (Bukhari, vol. 4, bk. 52, no. 260). It is deeply ingrained in Islamic culture—which is one reason why it was Abdul Rahman’s family that went to police to file a complaint about his conversion, even so many years after the fact. Whatever triggered their action now, they could be confident that the police would receive such a complaint with the utmost seriousness.

The Abdul Rahman case is an opportunity for the British and American governments to refine and clarify what exactly they mean by freedom: is it simple one-person one-vote self-determination, which has elected exponents of political Islam in large numbers recently in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere? Or is it Western concepts of universal human rights and freedoms, as derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition and encapsulated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Abdul Rahman may go free simply as a bid to keep American aid flowing into Kabul. But the deeper problem within Afghan society—and the larger lack of focus in the Western powers’ overall aims in Afghanistan and Iraq—will still remain. We may hope that sometime soon President Bush, having determined to keep his new “partners in the cause of freedom,” will call for the removal of the Sharia provisions in the Afghan and Iraqi Constitutions, and declare his support for full freedom of conscience such as that exercised by Abdul Rahman.

Certainly such a course would lose him many friends in the Islamic world, but it would win him many there and elsewhere as well—among those who hold that the dignity of the human person, and the right not to be coerced into belief, are worth defending.

Jim Geraghty in the NYSun: Intolerable trial

Andrew McCarthy:

You reap what you sow. What is happening in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) is precisely what we bought on to when we actively participated in the drafting of constitutions which — in a manner antithetical to the development of true democracy — ignored the imperative to insulate the civil authority from the religious authority, installed Islam as the state religion, made sharia a dominant force in law, and expressly required that judges be trained in Islamic jurisprudence. To have done all those things makes outrage at today’s natural consequences ring hollow.

We can pull our heads up from the sand now and say, “No, no, no! We’re nice people. We didn’t mean it that way. That’s too uncivilized to contemplate.” But the inescapable truth is: the United States made a calculated decision that it wasn’t worth our while to fight over Islamic law (indeed, we encouraged it as part of the political solution). People who objected (like moi) were told that we just didn’t grasp the cultural dynamic at work. I beg to differ — we understood it only too well.

Islamic law does not consider conviction, imprisonment, or death for apostasy to be an affront to civilization. That’s the way it is.

Daveed Garteinstein-Ross/Counterterrorism Blog:

This case has generated an enormous amount of media attention because the U.S. and its allies liberated Afghanistan from the fundamentalist Taliban regime, so Westerners find it disconcerting that people can still be killed in that country for leaving the Islamic faith. While this media attention is warranted, it is important for observers to understand that the problem of apostasy laws reaches far beyond Abdul Rahman and Afghanistan.

This is fundamentally an issue that people in the counterterrorism field and those who follow terrorism should care about. The Bush administration has invested in a strategy of democratization to counter the extremism that can be found in the Islamic world. But voting rights will not serve as an effective counterbalance to extremism if voting is simply superimposed over the current Middle Eastern political systems, with their lack of basic political freedoms. The most crucial freedoms for creating true democracy in the Middle East are freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion — and of these, the lack of freedom of religion in the region is the most dramatic.

…Islamic apostasy laws have long been a problem that fell beneath the media’s radar. With the attention focused on the Abdul Rahman case, the issue may now begin to get some of the attention it deserves. Ultimately, given the democracy’s centrality to U.S. attempts to transform the region, it is an issue that may affect us all.

It does affect us all.

Cindy Sheehan
Harry Reid
Mary Mapes
George Clooney
Sean Penn
Howard Dean
Ward Churchill
Dan Rather
Chris Matthews
Nancy Pelosi
Noam Chomsky
Kofi Annan
Ramsey Clark

Send LGF any other names you think should be on the list.

Here’s mine:

For its reckless endangerment of national security, unapologetic distortions of our troops’ commitment to the mission in Iraq, trashing of 9/11 families who refused to capitulate to political correctness at Ground Zero, routine insipidity and unaccountability, laughable hypocrisy, protectionism for Democrats and liberal pet projects, dishonest Bush-bashing, anti-war pandering, cluelessness by the barrel, narcissism, and skyscraping editorial arrogance and snobbery, I nominate…

The New York Times.

Anti-war activists and far-left organizations have been galvanized by Cindy Sheehan’s continuing protest outside President Bush’s Crawford, Texas, ranch. MoveOn.org has hopped on the bandwagon with a newspaper ad and Internet campaign. Air America hosts, all too happy to talk about something other than their own unpleasant political and financial woes, have embraced Sheehan. Dem activist Joe Trippi is plugging a “Meet with Cindy” website, which in turn plugs the Crawford Peace House. Even the “Hip Hop Caucus” has hitched a ride:

On Wednesday, a coalition of anti-war groups in Washington called on Bush to speak with Sheehan, who they say has helped to unify the peace movement.

“Cindy Sheehan has become the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement,” said Rev. Lennox Yearwood, leader of the Hip Hop Caucus, an activist group. “She’s tired, fed up and she’s not going to take it anymore, and so now we stand with her.”

And they’ll follow her wherever the cameras take them. According to one Democrat blog report:

Cindy is scheduled to appear in Italy, Colorado, Louisiana, and Washington, DC for the September 24th mass rally. But for now, she seems content to make her stand in the Lone Star State. When we spoke this evening, she said that she has a few questions for the president and that she’s heading to Crawford to get the answers. “I am not leaving until George answers me or I am arrested. I may stay there the entire month of August.”

Mrs. Sheehan has made a splash with the far Left and in the MSM. Her tenacity is impressive. But the dishonesty and disingenuousness of her benefactors and cheerleaders is intolerable. David Brock’s Media Matters and others, for example, have attacked Bill O’Reilly and me for “lying” and “smearing” Mrs. Sheehan, when any sane person can see that’s not the case. I’m re-posting the link to the video of our discussion (here) and the full, un-Dowdified transcript below in the extended entry. [Update: Cindy Sheehan responds here and also posts on her good friend Michael Moore's site.]

Meanwhile, MSM reporters continue to ignore the glaring contradiction in Mrs. Sheehan’s accounts of her meeting with President Bush. Reading comprehension-challenged leftists can’t seem to grasp that the issue is not whether Mrs. Sheehan was anti-war before her son died in Iraq (she was), but why she has completely changed and embellished her account of Bush’s behavior and her and her family’s impressions of him. Patterico spells it out for the slow wits at the Los Angeles Times.

Speaking of slow-wittedness, the Cindy Sheehan juggernaut has resulted in an uptick in profanity-laced moonbat hate mail from Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers incapable of rational debate. Here’s just a sample. Excuse the language.

An e-mailer named Dan Opacki, whose name appears on this anti-war manifesto, writes:

X-Originating-IP: [206.190.38.172]
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 03:54:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: dan opacki danopacki@yahoo.com
Subject: oriental dolls
To: malkin@comcast.net

Didn’t you pose for Oriental Dolls magazine a couple of years ago? You look just like one of those little fuck sluts with her wide open legs and sloppy cunt – Oh no excuse me, that’s your face.

Sincerely,
Dan

[Update: A different Dan Opacki with a comcast account sent the following e-mail this afternoon to clarify...]

From: danopacki@comcast.net
To: malkin@comcast.net
Subject: What’s going on?
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:35:51 +0000
X-Mailer: AT&T Message Center Version 1 (Dec 17 2004)
X-Authenticated-Sender: ZGFub3BhY2tpQGNvbWNhc3QubmV0

Hello Michelle,

A friend of mine called me and told me that she was e-mailed by someone else telling of my name on your web-site. I’m not sure what’s going on but I can assure you that I did not write such crass words as what appears attributed to my name. I’m a real person with a real profession and a reputation and while yes, I singed a petition, I did not call you those nasty names. I have hardly little time to read ANY website, let alone yours, and I’d appreciate that you also post this letter too. Or, take my name off of your website immediately. I am tempted to seek legal recourse about this if you don’t. Any idiot can open a yahoo account free of charge and apprently someone did, using my name – why? I have no clue, but it was NOT the real Dan Opacki. While we disagree politically we share common decency. I hope you respond so. And I am not selling a sofa. I don’t know what’s going on here.
Peace,
D

E-mailer Williams cuts to the chase:

X-Originating-IP: [68.142.206.95]
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:42:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: William us96143@yahoo.com
Subject: TIP

To: malkin@comcast.net

Here’s a tip for you, I hope your entire family perishes in a war of your liking. Fucking cunt.

And Patrick Mitchell, who works [Update: he has been canned. Please don't bother the company anymore. Thanks] at the Los Angeles office of Ogletree and Deakins, writes from work:

X-Originating-IP: [216.105.154.202]
From: “Mitchell, Patrick” Patrick.Mitchell@ogletreedeakins.com
To: “‘malkin@comcast.net’”
Subject:
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:41:22 -0400
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72)

YOU STINK you nasty CUNT! Eat Shit and DIE bitch!!

You tell me who the hate-mongers are.

***
Other views:

Debra Saunders has a sane column available at Real Clear Politics.

Instapunk gets brutally candid.

Other members of the Sheehan family apparently do not share Mrs. Sheehan’s views. The Anchoress takes a closer look. [Update: Drudge is now headlining the family's e-mail.]

More from Brainster’s Blog.

***
Update, 1:50 pm eastern time: I have just received an e-mail and phone call from
Gray L. Geddie of Ogletree Deakins. Here’s the e-mail…

Dear Ms. Malkin,

I am the Managing Shareholder of the law firm of Ogletree Deakins with offices located across the country. I was very disturbed to learn today that a legal secretary in our Los Angeles office sent you the vile e-mail referenced on your home page. Such remarks are clearly inappropriate in any context and an e-mail such as this certainly should not have been sent during working time using our firm’s equipment. The comments of this employee are not reflective of the views or opinions of the firm and are directly in violation of our e-mail policy. As Managing Shareholder, I wanted to extend to you our apologies and let you know that this serious violation of our firm’s work rules has resulted in the discharge of this employee.

Once again, let me offer you our deepest apologies for any discomfort that the referenced e-mail has caused. It will not happen again.

Sincerely,

Gray Geddie

Thanks to Mr. Geddie and to all who wrote.

***
Update II: The New York Sun editorializes on Cindy Sheehan’s Crowd…

It’s easy to see why Cindy Sheehan, the 48-year-old mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, has become the new face of the anti-war movement, featured in a New York Times editorial on Tuesday and a Maureen Dowd column yesterday morning. Camped out in Crawford, Texas, near President Bush’s ranch, she’s a more sympathetic face than a lot of the alternatives. But as sad as Ms. Sheehan’s loss is – and we don’t belittle it – she has put herself in league with some extreme groups and individuals.

For starters, Ms. Sheehan has been posting on Michael Moore’s Web site, writing, “We have such a strong coalition of groups. GSFP, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out and the Crawford Peace House. I talked with John Conyers today and he wrote a letter to George signed by about 18 other Congress members to request that he meet with me. I also talked to Maxine Waters tonight and she is probably going to be here tomorrow.”

It turns out that the Crawford Peace House Web site includes a photo depicting the entire state of Israel as “Palestine,” and it carries a link to a report that when Prime Minister Sharon visited Crawford, the “peace house” greeted him with an “800-foot-long banner containing all of the United Nations resolutions that Israel is in violation of.” The Crawford Peace House site also features a photo of Eugene Bird, who has suggested that Israeli intelligence was responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA. UPJ organized the march during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, at which a New York Sun poll of 253 of the protesters found that fully 67% of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement “Iraqi attacks on American troops occupying Iraq are legitimate resistance.” In other words, Ms. Sheehan’s “coalition” includes a lot of people who think the persons who killed her son were justified.

Read the whole thing.

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Update III: More info on the Sheehan family’s dissenters here.

President Bush responds.

Greg at Deep Down in Texas photoblogs the protest site.

Update IV:

Paul at Power Line shares thoughts on the nation’s fortitude.

The Astute Blogger shines light on more insanity.

Jeff Goldstein spots a moonbat celebrity equating Mrs. Sheehan with the Chinese protester who ran in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square. Really.

The Vacaville Reporter files a new story on the split between Mrs. Sheehan and other members of the Sheehan family.

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Previous:

“The Grief Pimps”
The friends of Cindy Sheehan

TRANSCRIPT FROM O’REILLY FACTOR, TUESDAY, AUGUST 9

Hi, I’m Bill O’Reilly. Thanks for watching us tonight. The fascinating saga of Cindy Sheehan. That is the subject of this evening’s “Talking Points Memo”.

Mrs. Sheehan is protesting in Crawford, Texas, trying to convince Americans the Iraq War is wrong and the president should be impeached. She is doing so because her son Casey, an Army specialist, was killed last year in Iraq.

No one has the right to intrude on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief. That’s number one. She’s entitled to her opinion on a situation that has deeply affected her. And she’s angry at the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CINDY SHEEHAN, SON DIED IN IRAQ: Because Joe Hagen, the deputy chief of staff said that I can tell you the president really cares. And I said you can’t tell me that because I met with him and I know that he doesn’t care. And I told them that I feel that my son didn’t die for a noble cause.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Well, here’s something very strange. Two months after her son died, Cindy and her husband Patrick did meet with President Bush, as she said. After that meeting, Cindy was quoted by a California newspaper as saying, “I now know [President Bush] is sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis. I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss.”

So Mrs. Sheehan has apparently changed her mind about the president. How did that happen? Well, for some reason she’s teamed up with Michael Moore and a man named Sam Husseini, both anti-war radicals. Husseini said this on “The Factor” just two days after 9/11.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAM HUSSEINI, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY: What sickened me was the act of what happened and that people would kill so many innocent people. But now I hear a drumbeat of having our soldiers kill women and children.

Colin Powell advocated, apparently, during the build-up of the Gulf War of flooding Baghdad and killing possibly four million people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Now that kind of lunacy is what Mrs. Sheehan is associating with. You would think the media would be cautious here with obvious inconsistencies and radicalism in play, but no.

In an editorial today in The New York Times, it says, “Mr. Bush obviously failed to comfort Ms. Sheehan when he met with her and her family. More important, he has not helped the nation give fallen soldiers like Casey Sheehan the honor they deserve.”

Well, let’s go back to the California article. Cindy Sheehan quoted as saying, “that was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.” It sounds like comfort to me. What say you, New York Times?

Finally, honest people could disagree about the Iraq War. Most Americans now oppose it. That could turn around with some progress. And “Talking Points” hopes it does.

But remember this. For every Cindy Sheehan, there’s a Sergeant Leroy Scott who’s recovering from the terrible wounds he received, attempting to go save a soldier’s life while serving as a medic in Iraq. Sergeant Scott is proud of his service, proud of his country. I talked with him today. I sense no bitterness at all.

I don’t know what is driving Mrs. Sheehan, but I do know she’s being used. And maybe she knows it as well. And that’s the Memo.

Now for the top story tonight. Another take on this. Joining us from Washington, FOX News analyst Michelle Malkin. Cindy Sheehan says she will appear on “The Factor” tomorrow. We shall see, Michelle.

This is a tough one, because you know, a woman lost her son, can’t — you got to be sensitive to that. But now she’s — I think she has been hijacked by some very, very far left elements. What do you think?

MICHELLE MALKIN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, I do want to emphasize what you said, Bill, which is that losing a child in any situation, whether it’s in a war, from an accident or disease, is one of the most painful of human experiences. And Mrs. Sheehan deserves compassion and sympathy.

And apparently, according to the accounts from last year when President Bush met with her, that’s exactly what she got. I don’t think that anybody should demonize her, but I do think that she has turned her private personal pain into a public circus.

And just look what it’s like down there in Crawford, Texas. You’ve got people surrounding her, people who are all too happy to help push her over the edge, yelling and screaming that the president was the one that killed her son.

No, it wasn’t. And it’s a shame that she doesn’t have anybody to help bring her back down to reality to remind her that it was Iraqi terrorists who ambushed her son on a roadside and killed him and many, many other of his colleagues in the military.

She has aligned herself now with Michael Moore, who considers those very Iraqi terrorists Minutemen. That’s what he calls them. He’s likening them to the American revolutionaries and considers them heroes. I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior, conduct, and rhetoric.

O’REILLY: Well, I have to say that she obviously does because she’s the lead story on Michael Moore’s Web site on an almost daily basis. And she knows – I mean, Michael Moore isn’t a subtle guy. Everybody knows where he stands.

So I mean, I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility for this, and also for the responsibility of other American families who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, who feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

You know, you got to think about those people as well. What about their feelings?

MALKIN: Of course.

O’REILLY: What about the sergeant I talked about? What about his feelings, you know, that this woman is now saying that the U.S. government are murderers and all this crazy stuff?

So I think we have to be compassionate, as you said, toward Mrs. Sheehan, but I do believe that she has to take responsibility for her actions.

MALKIN: No question.

O’REILLY: Now she’s being used by The New York Times and other, you know, people who have an agenda. Don’t you think she’s being used?

MALKIN: Well, it must be mutual exploitation, because clearly, I believe that she believes what she is saying now. And when she writes op- ed pieces for far left groups like the Common Dreams Web site, accusing the Bush administration of being the worst and biggest terrorist outfit in the world, I don’t think anybody is putting those words in her mouth.

I do think that there are a lot of free riders in the anti-war, anti-military left, who are getting a lot of mileage out of her grief. And I would hope that there are other members of her family who find this very unseemly.

You mentioned Sam Husseini, who’s with the Institute for Public Accuracy. This is the outfit that sent Sean Penn to do pro-Saddam propaganda before the invasion of Iraq. There’s a larger group involved here, a coalition called the United for Peace and Justice Coalition.

And among them are a group called Code Pink, which is headed by Madea Benjamin, who’s a terrorist sympathizer, dictator worshipping propagandist. And Mrs. Sheehan has hooked up with her at various counterdemonstrations. And these people have an agenda of basically undermining the military.

O’REILLY: She has thrown in — there is no question that she has thrown in with the most radical elements in this country. That is — now, it happened before. Some of the 9/11 families also took this road, you’ll remember, and are still active to this day. There’s a big controversy about the 9/11 Museum down at the World Trade Center.

And you know, there are some people who hate this government, hate their country right now, and blaming Bush for all the terrorism and all the horror in the world.

Here’s a question, Michelle. Do they have a right to this opinion without being scorned?

MALKIN: No, without being scorned, no. And I wouldn’t call it scorned. I would call it scrutiny. And the mainstream media is not doing it.

I mean, The New York Times editorial board is all too eager to prop her up as some sort of martyr and to buy her line when clearly her story hasn’t checked out.

O’REILLY: Yes, her story hasn’t changed.

MALKIN: And so I think – and I think that angle you’re emphasizing is absolutely right here, which is the mainstream media just lapping this up and perpetuating myths and inaccuracies when they know it’s not the truth.

O’REILLY: Yes. They don’t identify — in The New York Times editorial today, it was obvious they did not say her story has been inconsistent. And they did not pinpoint that she is in bed with the radical left.

Michelle, thanks very much as always.

***

More:

President Bush’s response.

Sean Penn’s adventures: The Actor and the Mullahs.

Michael Ledeen: When is an election not at election?

Full coverate at Regime Change Iran.