A Mother and the President (Time Magazine)

[dooner]

A Mother And the President
BY AMANDA RIPLEY IN CRAWFORD, 8/14

A woman lost her son in Iraq and won't leave George W. Bush alone until he sees her. Who is she, and why is she stirring such emotion?

(snip)
Sheehan is unflinching about why she's here. She says George W. Bush killed her son. She demands that U.S. troops come home now, and she insists on telling that to Bush personally. She speaks without caveat. "I'm not afraid of anything since my son was killed," she says. But she has never been one to move quietly through life. Father Michael McFadden, a priest she once worked for, calls her "very defiant, very stubborn, very strong willed" when dealing with authority. When a soldier from the local base comes by to argue with her, she asks him to go for a walk. She puts her arm around him. Soon they are hugging. Her friends call her Attila the Honey.

Back home in California, her family is imploding under its grief. Sheehan lost her job at Napa County Health and Human Services because of all her absences, she says. Husband Pat, 52, couldn't bear having Casey's things at home and put most of them in storage. "We grieved in totally different ways," Cindy says. "He wanted to grieve by distracting himself. I wanted to immerse myself." A car tinkerer, he added two 1969 VW Bugs to his collection recently and diverted some of his sorrow into them. The couple separated in June.
(snip)

Still, it is hard to know when a flash-fire protest in a prairie will turn into something more. Surely it didn't happen when Martin Sheen called (which was on Day 5). Nor did it when the police donned riot gear, as they did on Day 7, when the President's motorcade came within 100 feet of Sheehan's ramshackle encampment. (Riot gear is casual fashion for police at protests these days, after all.) Attendance figures--about 100 by midweek--did not break any records either.

But the people who did come made it seem different from other antiwar spasms. A retired postal worker drove from San Diego for 26 hours. A local soldier who had just returned from Iraq appeared with his mom. And a truck driver--a former Marine who had never been to an antiwar protest before--decided to pull his 18-wheeler full of frozen pizzas into Crawford just to shake Sheehan's hand.
(snip...read more)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1093760-1,00.html

[Canadiana]

1. oh my god

If I hadn't cancelled my subscription when that snake Coulter was on the cover, I would cancell it again......

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Welcome to DU. It really belittles her and the anti-war movement

in tiny cuts here and there. Not to mention she got it wrong about who was singing "God Bless America"

[cliss]

3. I think Time magazine is underestimating this.

"..it's hard to know when a flash-fire protest will turn into something more".

That's touching that they're trying to make it look like "just another protest", or that it will fade into the sunset. Or the public will grow tired of this, yawn and turn of the TV.

If Time were REALLY feeling the pulse of America, they would realize that it's not entirely about Cindy. It's about US, and how much we're willing to put up with as a nation. I'd say the U.S. has been unbelievably patient, trampled, pushed off to the side while others decided its fate.

Cindy Sheehan is simply the hole in the dike that suddenly opens up and the water starts roaring out. The trickle turns into a flood. She is simply putting a voice to what the vast majority of Americans feel. She's simply the emotional lightning rod for this country, at long last.

It's ironic that Bush's most powerful foe is not someone of his own equal; like Putin or Ahmadinejad, or even Saddam. It's a woman in a ditch. She simply refuses to give up, and sometimes that can override all the power vested in one man.

Bush holds all the cards. He has everything. Cindy Sheehan has nothing, except her own tenacity. When the balance of power becomes that lopsided, people start taking a closer look.

And they don't like what they see.

[etherealtruth]

4. I really like the last paragraph

"A fair question. There is a risk, though, that Sheehan's ideas will never stop spreading down the road. In 1965 a group of just 25 antiwar protesters demonstrated outside President Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch. Within a few years, the handful had turned into a movement."

[YOY]

5. Time's catering to the Religious Right as more than

looney tunes fringe elements is the reason I refuse to read their rag.

Newsweek is better...not by much, but is infinitely better. It just tees me off when they try to ride Time's lead. Often like other news networks and Fox. What appears to me emulating for the fear of being labeled the 'liberal media.'

[Bumblebee]

6. While it's true that the article does not read like a life of a saint,

it actually humanizes her and is not really bad. I think we sometimes want too much :)

[dooner]

7. I agree

And these writers are under pressure to make their features "balanced" so they can't go all gushy over Cindy.

Pretty much, everything I have read by anybody who has obviously talked to Cindy, is pretty nice. Cindy's honesty speaks for itself...and it always come through.