JoeTrippi.com

Frank Rich’s op-ed from the New York Times yesterday gives a great description of how the right uses its tactic of character assasination on its enemies. While it may have worked on people like John McCain, John Kerry, and Joseph Wilson in the past, Rich argues that the case of Cindy Sheehan is unique – the American people sympathize with her loss and demand that the President deliver answers. This issue is far bigger than Cindy Sheehan…

The hope this time was that we’d change the subject to Cindy Sheehan’s “wacko” rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands – both that of Mr. Bush’s what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself – are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother’s bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her.

And from the end of the article:

THIS summer in Crawford, the White House went to this playbook once too often. When Mr. Bush’s motorcade left a grieving mother in the dust to speed on to a fund-raiser, that was one fat-cat party too far. The strategy of fighting a war without shared national sacrifice has at last backfired, just as the strategy of Swift Boating the war’s critics has reached its Waterloo before Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury in Washington. The 24/7 cable and Web attack dogs can keep on sliming Cindy Sheehan. The president can keep trying to ration the photos of flag-draped caskets. But this White House no longer has any more control over the insurgency at home than it does over the one in Iraq.