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Winter: Even as a loose cannon, Cindy Sheehan shows courage

Published October 14, 2006 at midnight

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I have never heard anyone I know really stick up for Cindy Sheehan, the woman who lost a son in Iraq in 2004 and has dedicated her life to holding George Bush accountable ever since.

Most of the descriptions you hear of Sheehan are more along the lines of "wingnut," "Bush basher," "Mama Moonbat," "Pitiful Pearl," "St. Cindy of Crawford" and "Chardonnay-swilling Surrender Junkie."

And let's be honest here: Sheehan is a loose cannon.

She's foul-mouthed, brash and so angry about the war she scares people.

Publicly calling the president "a lying bastard," as Sheehan has done, is not something you do without offending a lot of Americans. Nor do you camp out next to the president's ranch, invite the media and 1,500 of your closest friends and command the leader of the free world to tell you why your soldier son died in an unjust war.

But Cindy Sheehan did, and I have to say that while her in-your-face tactics may be hard to swallow, there are parts of her I absolutely, unabashedly admire, starting with her courage.

Let's be clear about something else: Sheehan was ahead of the curve, even prescient.

It was back in August when she called the president a liar. This month, a CNN poll showed that a majority of Americans now share that opinion, though they didn't use her graphic language.

About 58 percent of those surveyed told CNN they now believe the president deliberately misled the public about progress in Iraq.

In the Sept. 29-Oct. 2 poll, 61 percent also said they now oppose the war, up from 58 percent at the beginning of September.

News reporter Erika Gonzalez recently interviewed Sheehan, who has just released Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism, which describes how the once-shy mother of four became the public face of America's anti-war movement.

Sheehan told Gonzalez that writing the book was much harder on her emotionally than she had anticipated, mainly because it dredged up memories of her son Casey as a boy, of how he died five days after he arrived in Iraq and of what it was like to bury him.

Sheehan also answers critics who accuse her of dishonoring soldiers: "Discrediting the mission is not discrediting the soldiers," she said. "It's just like being against the president and the administration is not being anti-American."

She spoke to Gonzalez about how her activism led to her divorce. Her ex-husband, she said, wanted to return to life as they knew it before Casey died, "and to me, it just wasn't possible."

She also admits her mistakes: "I regret calling George Bush a 'lying bastard' . . . I regret that heavy rhetoric and language that I used. But that was a long time ago, when I was still very angry and bitter . . . We can't fight hatred with more hatred."

Critics have made much of another admission in her book - that she fantasized about killing Bush as a baby so that the war would never have happened.

That dark secret shouldn't shock anyone. Cindy Sheehan lost her son; retaliation would be my first instinct, too. Anyone who says he's scandalized by that admission is blowing hot air.

As I watched Sheehan on the news over the past two years, I couldn't help but contrast her unpolished image to that of other female newsmakers of her generation: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Anne Coulter, Laura Bush.

Not once have I seen Sheehan in makeup, and her hair is often hidden under a straw hat. Her skin appears deeply lined, likely because of all her anti-war protests and month-long camp- outs.

I'd have to guess there isn't a vain bone in Sheehan's body. What you see is what you get, and in this era of image consultants and professional makeovers, I find that incredibly refreshing and honest.

My guess is history will be kind to Cindy Sheehan, portraying her as a woman cut from the same cloth as America's civil rights leaders and abolitionists.

For me, she's an example of anthropologist Margaret Mead's famous observation: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that can."