On the day that Carry Nation began her long saloon-smashing career, no one stopped her.

It was June 6, 1899, that Carry Nation felt that she had a divine call to go to Kiowa, in southern Barber County, and smash the saloons there. She secured a great pile of stones, hitched up her buggy and drove to Kiowa, where she created havoc at the bars. Standing amid the rubble of her damage, she dared the city officials to arrest her, but they declined.

Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times, and paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets. She published newsletters and later in life even appeared in vaudeville.

Sometimes she miscalculated. "I have no sympathy for this friend of the brewers," was her reaction to the shooting -- ultimately fatal -- of President McKinley. While this didn't go over well with the crowd at the time, the fact remains that no man could have gotten away with a fraction of what she did.

Logic be damned.

When Cindy Sheehan began her tirade last summer, many who disagreed with her were afraid to say so, and held their tongues. Those who did speak out were called callused and insensitive -- as if the woman's admittedly sympathetic status as a mother somehow solemnized the nonsense she spouted.

While this is not a new technique, I'm seeing it more and more. Logically, what Cindy Sheehan says is not much different from what Ward Churchill or Michael Moore says. The difference is that she's the mother of a veteran killed in combat, and that status is seen as immunizing her from criticism. Similarly, an Iraq War veteran can get away with saying things which a regular anti-war activist would be called on.

I've never been persuaded by arguments to authority, because they are not logical. (When I was in the third grade a teacher put it to the class like this: "If President Johnson said the moon was made of blue cheese, would you believe it?") Laundering a bad argument by having it spouted by a victim or other sympathetic is just another variation on the technique of argumentum ad vericundiam. This is not to say that there are not legitimate arguments to authority, such as when a particular authority has special expertise in a given field and that expertise is directly related to the argument made. But claims to "moral authority" based on victim status fail to impress me at all. Not only are such claims illegitimate, but there's often an implied threat accompanying them. That threat is, I believe, ad hominem in nature, and it's along the lines of "if you dare to disagree with this poor embattled soul, we will denounce you as an evil, heartless person." It has nothing to do with the merits of the argument, but it works.

Thus, victimhood is often a hatchet (if of the "concealed carry" variety).