Ladies and gents, I introduce to the anti–anti-Sheehan left, the grammatical concept of The Noun Phrase. (I’m tempted to call it a compound noun but an English major friend said it isn’t.) It’s a noun that is formed by two or more words, that has a definition independent of the words that form it.

Example: “media whore:” Someone who likes to bask in the attention that the media tends to give to scandalous stories and heart-gripping victims, like bereft mothers. Another example: “sacred cow:” Someone who is immune from criticism.

So, if someone calls Cindy Sheehan a “media whore,” they don’t mean a “loose woman.” And when someone calls her a “sacred cow,” they don’t mean she’s a real cow either. I’m known to split hairs over semantics but this is ridiculous.