Understanding Mother Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan has worked hard to became the left wing's biggest kook. She probably has done more to alienate people from the antiwar movement than any busload of American flag burners.

If she's not making outrageously unsupportable claims (Bill Clinton killed more Iraqis than George Bush) or sucking up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez (a despicable sack of sh*t), she's pulling off one stunt or another, like trying to get into last night's State of the Union speech (wearing an inflammatory t-shirt).

But I stop short of suggesting that Mother Sheehan go back to California and resume the simple cookie-baking life she led before her beloved son died in Iraq and that tragedy became a personal call to arms that morphed into a summer-long campout-protest on the road to President Bush's Texas ranch.

I met Cindy Sheehan in 1973. Okay, I met someone very much like her that year while covering the run-up to the Gainesville 8 trial, which was the last big Nixon era conspiracy trial. The defendants were eight Vietnam vets charged with trying to disrupte the 1972 Republican National Convention. The allegation was ridiculous considering that the convention hall was ringed with a 10-foot high chain link fence, and despite a right-wing ringer of a judge, the Gainesville, Fla., jury saw through the BS and acquitted the whole bunch of them.

One of the vets had a mother who, like Cindy Sheehan, had been minding her own suburban housewife business until the long arm of the Nixon Justice Department in the form of its despicable attorney general, John Mitchell, reached out and grabbed her own beloved son by the proverbial short and curlies.

Like Sheehan, this fiftysomething woman was changed overnight. Like Sheehan, she said and did outrageous things that often weren't particularly helpful to the cause she so passionately espoused. As she became more radical, we went from being friends to foes. I was no longer one of the few reporters who was calling attention to abuses of the federal grand jury system generally and persecuted antiwar Viet vets like her son specifically. In her eyes, I was a member of the big bad establishment news media and probably a spy, as well.

But goddamnit, she believed deeply -- and correctly -- that the American government had failed her son. So does Mother Sheehan, and no matter how silly or outrageous her hijinks, you gotta respect that.