Jeff Goldstein on the rhetorical tricks being played by Cindy Sheehan's supporters:

...trick being used here, as I’ve tried to point out, is to conflate arguments against Ms Sheehan’s positions with attacks on her person, then to condemn as attacks on her person those arguments made against her positions. The next move, then, is to follow with an outraged insistence that those who’ve just gotten through engaging Ms Sheehan’s positions engage Ms Sheehan’s positions, in a kind of infinite deferral of the argument intended solely to keep the “argument” itself foregrounded.

That is, the progressivists driving this story claims to want answers to the same grandstanding questions Ms Sheehan claims to want answers to—namely, why are we in Iraq; for what noble cause did Casey Sheehan die; if the war is so righteous, why hasn’t the President sent his daughters?—questions that any honest observer will recognize are powerful only so long as they remain unanswered. After all, it is the posing of the questions that carry the rhetorical force, given that the answers have been offered and repeated ad naseum.