slate | Sheehan sees the Khans’ story through the prism of her own sour
experience in the public square. The villains aren’t all on one side of
the aisle. “I think the Khans’ grief is being used by a party that is
treacherous,” she said. “I have all the sympathy in the world for them.
Not only sympathy, but empathy.”
She’s not just talking about the loss of her son but also her onetime
alliance with the Democratic Party. After “Camp Casey,” Sheehan was a
key figure in the Democrats’ efforts to reclaim power in Congress, which
were predicated on riding, if not co-opting altogether, the moral
energy of the anti-war movement. The strategy by the 2006 midterms was
to rail against the now-unpopular war and regain a majority in the
House. Sheehan met with members of Congress. She campaigned
relentlessly. “Every Democrat I met with in 2005 said, ‘If you help us
win the House, we’ll help you end the war,’ ” she recalled. Only one of
those two things came true.
“Back when I was working with them after my son was killed, I was
still a Democrat,” Sheehan said. “I still had some kind of illusion that
they really cared about these issues the same way I did, but they
really only cared about power.”
The party did reclaim Congress, though, and before long Nancy Pelosi presided over a new bill that continued to fund the war to the tune of $95 billion.
“I felt really betrayed,” Sheehan said. “But since then I’ve realized
they didn’t betray me. It was my fault for thinking they would do
anything else. If you pick up a rattlesnake, don’t be surprised if it bites you.”
“What Trump says is rhetorically belligerent,” she said. “But what
Clinton and the Democrats actually did, it killed people. Why was the
Khans’ son in Iraq? Why was my son in Iraq?” (Khizr Khan has made the same point,
albeit a little more gently: “As a Muslim American I feel that these
policies are not in the interest of the United States of America. ... We
have created a chaos.”)
“That’s where the debate should be,” Sheehan went on. “If you support
Hillary, I don’t really care, but you need to know what you’re
supporting.”
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