NYT Suddenly Fans of Parental Authority

Maureen Dowd has a smarmy editorial in the New York Times today, in which she lectures Bush for not interrupting his vacation to visit with the mother of a dead soldier for a second time. Now, I know the fight against terrorism has been much cleaner than we could have anticipated (despite what the NYT or CNN might have us believe), but there have been over 1,840 deaths in the past several years. If Bush were to meet every one of those mothers, he would have to meet five per day for the next year - not an overwhelming number, granted, but still enough that it would consume an hour or two every day. And that's if they come visit him. I checked the Constitution, and I couldn't find that Executive responsibility anywhere. Which is probably good, as Franklin Roosevelt would have had to meet over 800 mothers each day, and Abraham Lincoln would have had to meet somewhere in the vicinity of 1,700. Per day. Imagine if he had to meet them twice?

Dowd concludes her incoherent rant with this gem:

[Bush's] humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.

Heh. Apparently now we are to be lectured on family values and objective morality by an arch-liberal at the New York Times? (We should ask her how she feels about parents teaching their children abstinence, or that evolution is flawed, or that not all religions are true. I suspect she might rethink her position on parental authority.)

I wonder if Ms. Dowd is aware that our military is composed entirely of adults capable of making their own decisions, men and women who voluntarily joined up. No one was forced. Parents are not "sending their children off to war," as some like to portray it, but rather they are standing aside as their grown children freely commit themselves to a certain cause, and respecting that decision.

Any mother clearly has the right to mourn her son's death, but to use that death as a political wedge to gain publicity is grotesque, and shows contempt not only for her son's choice of profession, but also his sacrifice. I'll leave you with the words of Lincoln, who struggled with the very same issue of sending young men off to die for such a nebulous ideal as "freedom":

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...

UPDATE: Similar thoughts yesterday from Protein Wisdom.
Hat tip: Rightwingsparkle