A Tale of Two Texans

Salon has an interesting opinion piece by Robert Bryce called The Hollow Man that offers up a comparison of two Texan-based Presidents who were faced with foreign wars gone awry--LBJ and W. And it points out why Cindy Sheehan has become such a lightning rod, for abuse from the right as well as the growing support she's feeling from all corners.

Bush doesn't go to funerals for our dead soldiers. Until last week, his administration had refused to release photos of the flag-draped caskets coming back to the United States. (The Pentagon caved as a result of a Freedom of Information Act suit.) When it comes to the second Iraq war, Bush displays no doubt, no anguish. And therein lies the key: It is that quality that made Johnson, for all his faults and failings, a great president. It's the same quality that exposes Bush as the wrong president at the wrong time, fighting the wrong war in the wrong place. Johnson felt the ruin that came with the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. And he was devastated by it. In early 1968, according to Nick Kotz's magnificent book, "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America," the war in Vietnam was going from bad to worse. "Since the Tet offensive had begun the previous month, five hundred American soldiers were dying every week. Often, late at night, the president would go down to the White House Situation Room to check on casualty reports. At times, when Johnson sat with visitors in the Oval Office, he would weep openly as he read from the previous day's casualty lists." Johnson felt the pain of others. And his courage and determination (along with the sharp prodding that came from Martin Luther King Jr.) to help the less fortunate forced Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. In doing so, Johnson achieved one of the great political -- and human rights -- victories of the last century. W. doesn't do human rights. He doesn't do casualty lists. Nor, apparently, does he cry. And as noted by author James Moore, that's what makes Sheehan such a powerful figure. Sheehan has rendered the complexities and carnage of the war into a simple question: Are you on the side of a grieving mother of a dead soldier? Or are you on the side of a president who continues to insist that this war is, in some way, noble? [...] LBJ, and other presidents who served during the Cold War, had a hot line to the Kremlin. Bush apparently has a hot line to God -- a connection that allows him to deny the questions raised by impertinent interlopers like Sheehan. Bush's religiosity is the key element here. He has a total belief in the rightness of his position. But there again comes a key difference with LBJ. Like the born-again Bush, Johnson was a man of faith. But he was a man of many faiths, often attending two churches -- one Roman Catholic and one Protestant -- on a given Sunday. Raised a Baptist, he became an elder at the Disciples of Christ Church near his home in Johnson City. Johnson's intellectual curiosity led him to see that one religion, one worldview, didn't hold all the answers. As Johnson's biographer, Ronnie Dugger, put it, LBJ was "an ecumenical movement all by himself." Bush's blind faith in his own path -- religious and military -- leaves no room for ecumenism, or doubt. And that lack of doubt, that lack of anguish over the lives being lost in Iraq, is emerging as his fatal flaw. Cindy Sheehan has placed that flaw into the spotlight for all to see.