Cindy’s Impeachment Tour Stops in Crawford

Tom Engelhardt writes on tomdispatch.com about the phenomena of the Soldier’s mother who is haunting Bush on his long Texas vacation.

“And then, if matters weren’t bad enough, there was Cindy Sheehan. She drove to Crawford with a few supporters in a caravan of perhaps a dozen vehicles and an old red, white and blue bus with the blunt phrase “Impeachment Tour” written on it. She carried with her a tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes and evidently not much else. She parked at the side of the road and camped out – and the next thing anyone knew, she had forced the president to send out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of his top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin.

For 45 minutes, they met and negotiated with her, the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state. Rather than being flattered and giving ground, she just sent them back, insisting that she would wait where she was to get the president’s explanation for her son’s death. (“They said they’d pass on my concerns to George Bush. I said, ‘Fine, but I’m not talking to anybody else but him’.”)

She’s been called up from the Id of his own war: a mother of one of the dead who demands an explanation, an answer, when no answer he gives will ever conceivably do; a woman who, like his neo-con companions, has no hesitation about going for the jugular. And, amazingly, she’s already made the man flinch twice.”