Cindy Sheehan: Grieving mother, activist, and "threat to national security"

For anyone who's made it to Wednesday of this week and doesn't know about Cindy Sheehan, start here.

Executive summary:

Sheehan's son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Baghdad sixteen months ago last week. Two months later, she received an invitation to meet President Bush privately at the White House. She attended, and found herself faced with a man who showed no apparent sign of moral responsibility for the policies that cost her son's life. Sheehan later went on to found Gold Star Families for Peace Last weekend, Sheehan drove to Crawford TX, where Bush is currently taking the longest vacation in recent presidential history, asking to talk to him about her son's death and the Iraq War. She's still making her stand on the road near Bush's ranch, waiting for a chance to speak with him.

But one thing about which George Bush is clearly serious--very serious--is not having his vacations interrupted. The word is that, if Sheehan, et al., haven't left the public road - ditch, actually, from the sound of it - where they are now, they will be arrested as a "threat to national security."

An aside on moral responsibility:

The thing about Bush is, he doesn't really get the idea of owning up, compromise, or cutting your losses. That's not because, as he and the truest of his true believers believe, he is incapable of making a mistake. It's because he's never really had to pay the price for any of his choices, no matter how poor or ill-advised. Someone else always does.

In the Bush world (and that includes brother Jeb), there are friends and patrons, and then there are the chumps. (Chumps are people who vote for his policies yet get nothing - or worse than nothing - in return. They're the people who are good for a touching photo op, but forgotten as soon as it's over, if not before. Blow a boat horn in a red state Wal-Mart, and you'll startle up chumps by the dozen.)

And when chumps don't play their parts, the Bush Plan is simple: Ignore them, refuse to acknowledge them, and - if they get uppity - retaliate. Ask Joe and Valerie Wilson. Ask Michael Schiavo. As Kevin Drum nicely summarized it in Schiavo's case:

The Bush children have always been distinguished by a fiery unwillingness to back down combined with an almost bestial pursuit of revenge against anyone who has ever crossed them. They don't want to beat their opponents, they want to destroy them.

This, though, simply beggars the imagination. What kind of human being would keep a vendetta like this alive at this point?

That's the thing about rhetorical questions: they answer themselves. The kind of person who would keep a vendetta like that alive is the kind of person who would allow the story to circulate that Cindy Sheehan could be arrested as a threat to national security.

Oregon Angle:

The word I get is that, as long as Sheehan is facing threat of arrest (or the genuine article), the Portland chapter of Veterans for Peace will be organizing a daily vigil for Sheehan at Shrunk Plaza (aka Federal Plaza), SW 3rd and Madison in Portland, daily from noon to 1PM.