By Margaret Carlson
August 10
Cindy Sheehan Just Wants to See Her President: Margaret Carlson
Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- I didn't think Cindy Sheehan, the mother waiting on that dusty Texas road for a chance to ask President George W. Bush why her son died in Iraq, was having much impact.
Then I saw her being Swift-Boated like John Kerry, whose medals and Purple Hearts were all a mistake, and like former ambassador Joe Wilson, reduced to being a ninny whose wife had to get him an assignment tracking down uranium sales in Niger.
Sheehan, word went out, is a flip-flopper. She'd once accepted the condolences of the president and there was a piece in her local paper, which quickly found its way to reporters, to prove it. In it, Sheehan was quoted as saying that Bush wanted ``freedom for the Iraqis,'' felt ``some pain for our loss'' and that he was ``a man of faith.''
All true, and not at all at odds with what she's saying now, which is that the war is not a ``noble'' cause, as Bush would have it, and that no one else's child should die there.
What that excerpt from her Vacaville, California, paper, provided to the Drudge Report, conveniently left out was the paragraph about the family's decision to behave in a decorous way on a solemn occasion, despite their feelings about the war.
`Loved One'
As she waited for Bush near his ranch in Crawford this week, Sheehan recalled that first encounter with her president, two months after strangers knocked at the door to say her son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, had been killed in an ambush in Sadr City.
She was still in shock and didn't know how to act in a place she never thought she would be, she said. Afterwards, she didn't want to tell the local reporter how let down she felt by a president who behaved like he was at a social event, who called her ``Mom'' and didn't seem to know the name or gender of her child, referring to him only as her ``loved one.''
Much more at:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_carlson&sid=a3HdcrlVtn64