Elaine Brower; a new standard for crackpots

I’m working on a story about the protest that happened in Philadelphia the other day, and waiting on a report from our eye witness snoop who was there. While doing some research on it and the background of the 30 organizations who took up the protest, I bumped into Elaine Brower. I’ve seen her name before, but we’ve always been more interested in IVAW. Anyhow, meet Elaine Brower.

She braggs about the fact that she’s a member of World Can’t Wait. Now, WCW was founded in 2005 to drive George Bush from office. It was founded by Charles Clark Kissinger – you can google Kissinger and nearly every link refers to his affiliation with the Revolutionary Communist Party. That’s the kind of people who wanted George Bush out of office and weren’t happy with the democratic process.

Brower is also a member of Military Families Speak Out – an affiliate of United for Peace and Justice which was founded by Leslie Cagan, a big supporter of Castro. So why does Brower belong to MFSO? Because she has a son, USMC Sergeant James Brower, who has been deployed three times to the GWOT.

In 2005, she did an interview with Newsday about her son’s deployments;

“Tell me, please,” his mother said, sitting across the street from her office in lower Manhattan. “What can I do to make sure he comes back alive?”

She’s already done the practical things.

She’s tried to talk him out of going. She bought him $2,000 worth of body armor and high-tech goggles, life-or-death gear the Marine Corps still does not provide.

When James transferred to another Marine unit, making his war-zone call-up all but certain – “I screamed and I cried for 24 hours and beat up on him the way only a mother can.”

None of it worked, of course. He’s shipping out five weeks from now for the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif. From there, it’s straight to Iraq.

His mother still remembers the 3 a.m. calls from Afghanistan. “He’d say, ‘Yeah, Mom, I was carrying ammo. I stepped into a hole and broke my ankle. But I kept running. They needed the ammo.’ Then, I’d get up in the morning and go to work, where people were talking about things like what was on TV last night.”

Her son, she said, shares her skepticism about the war in Iraq. Lots of his fellow Marines do. Support for some broader policy is not what motivates them.

“Really, they don’t train these guys to protect their country,” Elaine Brower said. “They train them to protect each other. I asked James, ‘Why are you going back?’ He said, ‘My buddies are over there, and I need to protect them.'”

So, she doesn’t understand that thing that only soldiers (and Marines) understand. My mother was the same way for twenty years – but my mother wasn’t bat shit crazy. You can almost smell the crazy in Brower’s voice when she tells the Newsday reporter how great it would be to lose her son like Cindy Sheehan did so she can be an even greater activist and get her some of that absolute moral authority;

“God forbid he goes over there and something happens to him,” she was saying yesterday as more grim news arrived from Iraq. “I’ll go off. I will. The way I’ll react, they’ll think Cindy Sheehan is a butterfly.”

I could hear the drool on her chin.

She’s upset that her son won’t listen to her insane rantings, so she expects the government to stop all wars because her son won’t stop going to war. Well, even though he’s survived three tours to the war, two tours of Iraq and one to Afghanistan, she’s still being a pain in the ass getting arrested at the Philly protest and still waving her LIVE son’s non-bloody shirt;

Elaine Brower, 53, who sits on the board of Peace Action of Staten Island, was one of those taken to jail. She has been organizing against the AEC because she is the mother of a Marine who just returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m sure her son is proud of his Mom who hangs out with communists and airs familial laundry in public.

Bush is gone, her son is home safe, why’s she still getting arrested?

Category: Antiwar crowd, Usual Suspects