Cindy Sheehan is the mom who is well on her way to toppling a president, or at least his credibility — and endangering the electoral future of the Republicans who marched us into the murderous Iraq conflict.
“I know they think I’m a dangerous woman,” Sheehan quipped to me last week. “Otherwise, why would all of these cops be here guarding George Bush? And all I want to do is talk. But I guess honest talk is something they’re afraid of.”
Sheehan is the 48-year-old mother from Vacaville, CA, who has camped near Bush’s cowboy vacation redoubt in Crawford, Texas, for most of this month, challenging Bush to talk to her about why her son Casey died. With predictable cowardice, Bush is AWOL when it comes to confronting critics.
Sheehan mentions that her son and Martin Luther King both died on the date April 4. “Dr. King and Casey were killed for this country. But there are differences. Dr. King’s struggle was real. My son died for a cause that we now know is a lie. It’s George Bush’s lie.”
It’s that raw and blunt challenge Bush can’t face. Sheehan has learned the price of challenging Bush’s delusional militarism, however. Scandal monger Matt Drudge began the onslaught (followed by the shrill thugs on talk radio and Fox), chiding that Sheehan had met with Bush in 2004, and that she “has dramatically changed her account.”
Sheehan told me, “Yes, I wanted to believe Bush then. I’m an American and we want to have faith in our government. But it was at that meeting I began to wonder. He kept calling me ‘Mom,’ and he wouldn’t say my son’s name or talk about him. He was very strange.”
Sheehan’s understanding has grown. So has America’s — hence the poll statistics. The grimmest realization is that we are not fighting terrorism in Iraq to keep it away from America. The terrorists have struck London, and Bush is ensuring that the violence will reach our shores again. Iraq, which wasn’t a terrorist center before the war, is now the world’s biggest terrorist recruitment center.
Cindy Sheehan is a symbol of the new dawn. She is just a mom and merely an American patriot. And that’s why Bush cowers on his ranch. God bless you, Cindy.
Group Senior Editor John Sugg’s blog is at www.johnsugg.com.
This article appears in Aug 17-23, 2005.
