Frank Rich: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Frank Rich: The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Ms. Sheehan, a mother, is being Swift Boated or Rove'd unsucessfully, while Bush shows how compassionate and "in touch" he is with those called to make the ultimate sacrifice.

ignore drug addict talk show hosts, like Limbaugh, or Fox analyst, the deprecated Fred Barnes, as if anyone contemplates his thoughts seriously. Rather consider what being a mom in her circumstance might be like.


Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost never tell her son's story.

They are afraid to go there because this young man's life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who gave the marching orders.

Specialist Sheehan was both literally and figuratively an Eagle Scout: a church group leader and honor student whose desire to serve his country drove him to enlist before 9/11, in 2000. He died with six other soldiers on a rescue mission in Sadr City on April 4, 2004, at the age of 24, the week after four American security workers had been mutilated in Fallujah and two weeks after he arrived in Iraq. This was almost a year after the president had declared the end of "major combat operations" from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln