I was reading this
article in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning while I ate my breakfast, and my wife eventually asked me what the heck I was nodding at. I thought for a second, then I told her: "This article gets the whole Cindy Sheehan thing exactly right -- hits it right on the head."
Everything about Cindy Sheehan and her situation should make you think, and in my case I've puzzled over exactly what to make of it for a while now.
Her basic situation, the loss of her son and her anger at the people who had contributed to sending him to die, was something that resonated with me and, obviously, with a lot of other people. It makes sense at a very basic level, "Yeah, she's his mom and she has every right to be mad as hell". And the reaction to her stand made a lot of people in America see what I already understood, that the right-wing attackers who came after her weren't people to be respected, but merely tiny, pathetic little men and women whose reaction to being wrong is so powerful that they'll go to any length not to admit fault.
But this Chronicle article gets it exactly right. Cindy Sheehan's area of credibility was that point, and her recent forays into other areas (standing behind Hugo Chavez? Seriously? Threatening to run against Feinstein?), while definately her right, serves to diminish that important authority.
I understand that speaking poorly of Cindy Sheehan at Daily Kos is akin to trash-talking Mother Theresa in the middle of the Vatican, but I believe this needed to be said. After all, if we fall into the habit of worshiping infallible superhuman leaders -- and I seriously believe that it's a basic tendancy of human nature to want, at a viceral level, to do just that -- we'll have fallen into the same trap as the GOP.