The War at Home: Cindy Sheehan's uphill battle

Newsweek ^ | March 21, 2008 | Miyoko Ohtake

[2ndDivisionVet]

Cindy Sheehan barely fits into her "campaign limo," her sister's blue Hyundai Tiburon. She ducks low to avoid hitting her head on the way in, and her knees are nearly at her chest when she sits, even with the seat rolled all the way back. Traveling over the Oakland Bay Bridge, her campaign manager at the wheel--steering with one hand and scrolling through e-mails with the other--the 6-foot-tall antiwar activist turned congressional hopeful tries in vain to stretch out in the passenger seat. It's raining when they pull into a parking spot near Berkeley City College, where Sheehan is about to give a speech, but she opens the window anyway; it's the only way to exit the car. The interior handle is broken, so the door must be opened from the outside.

It's not easy--but then little on Sheehan's long and improbable journey to this place has been. When she first set up her lawn chair outside George W. Bush's Texas ranch in the summer of 2005--a grief-stricken mother demanding to speak to the president about the death of her son Casey in Iraq--she had no idea how she would capture the media's imagination and spark a movement. Her 26-day roadside vigil three years ago drew thousands of supporters to Crawford, Texas, and prompted marches and protests across the country. But her celebrity came with steep costs; divorce, heartbreak and exhaustion caused her to quit her antiwar activism in May 2007 to return home to Dixon, Calif., to mother her surviving children.

Her retirement didn't last long.

[Big Guy and Rusty 99]

piss off you marxist media whore! Stop riding your son’s grave to fame.