RUSH: I totally understand that point of view. I guess my view is somewhat similar, although I find it difficult to be critical of Cindy Sheehan. She’s a woman who lost her son. Now, I know there have been a lot of people who lost their kids in war — and I don’t care who they are, it’s not easy, and people deal with it in their own ways. I think the real shame here is her exploitation by the Democrats, by John Conyers. John Conyers dragged her to his impeachment meeting over the Downing Street memos. They have made her a star in her own mind, and this attention that she is getting, I’m sure, is helping to assuage her loss, and the media is exploiting her like she is a genuine, spontaneous eruption. They are not telling the truth about how this woman has been shepherded by Joe Wilson. There are pictures of her with Joseph Wilson — yes, of Valerie Plame fame. She has shown up at all these anti-war rallies. She was an anti-war mother before any of this began to happen. It’s who she is. You know, she has the right to go anywhere she wants in the country. She has the right to go sit where she wants. She has the right to say fruitcake things all she wants. It’s the exploitation of her that I think is so typical of the left in this country and the media. If anybody ought to be feeling sorry for her, it is them because they’re the ones that are out there decrying all the loss in Iraq and all these 1800 deaths, and yet they are happy to exploit this woman and capitalize on her misery or her sadness or her grief or whatever it is, and they’re pumping her up and making her feel important, and the bottom line of this is, Tim, she’s killing their cause. She’s not hurting her cause at all. She’s making a mockery of the media that supports her.
She’s making a mockery of the Democrats and the Michael Moores that support her. She’s no different than the NARAL ad. If people have the sense to figure out the NARAL ad is BS, and just obscene, the same thing here with this, on a little bit different level. Now, I take comfort in the fact that… I get e-mails from people. For example. “Rush! Rush! I was watching cable TV last night and they had Cindy Sheehan on,” and I make note of the station that they say they were watching and I go look at the ratings and I see 200,000 people watched this show, and I say, “So what? Let her have the whole network. Two-hundred-thousand people.” Folks, don’t get so agitated here. I keep telling you that the days of this kind of stuff winning the hearts and minds of a majority of Americans is over. Your reaction to it, I guarantee you, is much more similar to the majority of people watching this than not. You still have this fear that this Cindy Sheehan story and the press lying about her and making her out to be something she’s not is persuading a lot of people. It’s not. All it’s doing is reinforcing these kooks who already hold this jaundiced view of Bush and the war on terror. It’s just reinforcing them in their opinion. They’re not winning any hearts and minds, they’re not persuading anybody. At the same time they’re exploiting this woman. It got to the point her family had to issue a statement begging her to stop this. I mean, if you need to know anything, know that. If you want to know how this is affecting people. Her family feels bad, her family thinks that she’s being exploited, her family thinks that she’s being made to look, you know, unfortunately like a fool here. Your anger at this, I think give her a break. Even if this is her natural mind-set, there’s countless Cindy Sheehans in the country but they’re not doing what she’s doing — and just because she’s sitting in a ditch down in Crawford, Texas, she’s become a hero. The media doesn’t tell the truth about her because they want to exploit her. They’re trying to use her. They don’t care about her, they don’t care about her son, John Conyers doesn’t care about her son. They just care about using her to try to gin up the same negative hate and seething rage that they have, that they’ve been unable to transfer to the majority of the American people, and that’s what I think is noteworthy about this.
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