Final word on Cindy Sheehan

The force of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita sucked public sympathy and media attention away from Cindy Sheehan (whose son was killed in action in Iraq). And, it seems this notoriously grieving mother does not appreciate losing her grip on the public’s consciousness to Mother Nature and the victims whose lives she devastated.

But Mrs Sheehan reclaimed the spotlight this week for what one can only hope is a final act to strut and fret her grief for television and then is heard no more….

As soon as Rita ceded a little TV coverage to her, Mrs Sheehan wasted no time in letting her erstwhile sympathizers know how disappointed she was that they abandoned their obsession with her cause celebre for what she dismissed as “a little wind and a little rain”. And, as if to demonstrate that Mother Nature and the victims she either killed or rendered homeless cannot match her flair for the dramatic, Mrs Sheehan staged her arrest in Washington on Monday by defying police orders to stop stalking the White House. But the decidedly inappropriate grin she gave as the police were carting her away makes it clear that she got the attention she sought.

What remains profoundly unclear, however, is the cause for which Sheehan continues to make a spectacle of herself (and of those who are becoming increasingly wary of association with her). After all, she became a sympathetic figure when we thought she was just the grieving mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who just wanted President Bush to meet with her; and, who was prepared to sit outside his ranch in Texas until he condescended to do so. But then we learned that the “compassionate conservative” Bush had already met with her.

Thus having been found wanton on that sympathy card, Mrs Sheehan then decided to use her son’s death as the raison d’être to oppose the war in Iraq. And even in this respect she warranted sympathy. But then she became a self-appointed spokesmom for all kinds of causes ranging from groups calling for the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq (and Afghanistan) to those demanding the cessation of American support for the “terrorist state of Israel.” Worse still, in language more becoming of Michael Moore than a grieving mother, she began calling Bush all kinds of unprintable names and warning of dire consequences for any politician (most notably Hillary Clinton) who does not see the war in Iraq (and American foreign policy in general) through her political prism.

Of course, Mrs Sheehan is entitled to grieve in any way she pleases. But it seems a perversion of her son’s memory for her to have used his death as a launching pad for her career as a rabid, misguided, uninformed, self-possessed political nut-case.

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