"One man's war"

I have to disagree with Suburban Gorilla here:

Media slut Deborah "Whoreville" Norville invited Lila Lipscomb (the mother of the soldier killed in Iraq who's featured in "Farenheit 9/11") onto her asinine show tonight. (Boy, MSNBC is really trying hard to be Fox News, aren't they?)

Well, she just couldn't stop herself. (You knew she couldn't.) She ended up - oh yes she did - asking Mrs. Lipscomb if just possibly, maybe just a little, wasn't it possible she was being used by Michael Moore?

Lila stared at her. "No," she said firmly. She said America was about people having their own opinions.

SG labels Norville's performance as "shameless", but I saw that same interview and I thought the question was a legitimate one and asked in a very respectful manner at the end of the interview. Other than that question, the interview barely even touched on the usual anti-Moore points. Lila, in her first national interview, showed that she is the perfect spokesperson for middle America. She is an apolitical individual who has always believed in the American dream and in the American military and now feels like her faith in those institutions has been ill-used by George W. Bush. She still believes in those things. She just no longer believes in George W. Bush.

Contrary to the attempt to portray all anti-Bush opinion as "wild-eyed", Lila comes across as the epitome of grace. Even if Norville had wanted to drag her over the coals, there just wasn't any opening in the interview for her to do so. At one point Norville asked Lila about some of the criticism Moore has received (it was the only other time in the interview that the controversy was raised) and Lila neatly knocked her back by saying, "Michael is quite capable of defending himself." In other words, the questions about Moore are not Lila's to resolve, so don't get her involved in that battle.

Norville asked Lila what she meant in the movie when she said that people just don't understand what is going on. That she used to think she knew what was going on, but she was wrong. Lila responded that she thought it was about WMD, that it was about the war on terror, that it was about Osama bin Laden. Now she knows that it is all about one man's war.

God bless you Lila.

Update: I understand Lila was on Al Franken today as well. I missed it. I think the thing that is most wonderful about Lila is that she demonstrates to many people that you don't have to give up your love of country or your support for the military if you become disillusioned about the abilities of the president. She is an example to others who might not like Bush but are under the mistaken belief that they have to support him in order to support the country and the troops.