I have heretofore avoided commenting on the Cindy Sheehan situation, but after a while these things become nearly impossible to avoid. I have compassion for Ms. Sheehan’s grief and recognize that I cannot fully grasp her feelings. Still, she has allowed her grief to translate not only into a political opinion, but she has clearly made herself into a public figure. And, since the media have decided to cover the story ad infinitum, I find myself with thoughts on the subject.

Some thoughts (some more developed than others):

• I am not big on stunts and this is a stunt—and made moreso by Ms. Sheehan’s supporters (and by politicians).
• What, exactly, does she hope to accomplish? What will meeting with the President do for her? I sincerely would like to know what it is she thinks she is going to accomplish.
• I did think that perhaps it would have been wise for Bush to have met with Sheehan early on. It likely would have been possible to diffuse the situation (at least in terms of the vigil). On the other hand, I have wonder as to the usefulness of having Sheehan rant at the President about seizing oil fields, lying, fighting for Israel and so forth. Further, there is the whole precedence issue.
• I wonder about people who can devote indeterminate amounts of time to these types of activities.
• Generically speaking, the idea that a single US citizens wants to meet with any President of the United States because they have a gripe they wish to share is clearly a ludicrous notion when considered apart from the media circus.
• The “vacation card�? wore thin on me years ago. Presidents don’t actually go on vacation, and any fair-minded person has to admit as much. The President has simply re-located temporarily out of Washington. And yes, he has spent some time clearing some brush. Regardless of one’s view of George W. Bush, any President is on the clock 24/7 for the entire length of their terms of office and they live with a great deal of stress (just look at the a before/after picture for any President and note how the job ages them). Is it really so ridiculous for a President to want to get out of Washington when Congress is similarly absent? Is it really too much to ask that he might want to do something relaxing once in a while? What, exactly, do people think he can’t do in Crawford in terms of being President? And if anyone has noticed, he has been in the news quite a bit of late—signing bills, receiving visitors, meeting with advisers and so forth. It ain’t as if he is playing on the ranch without a care in the world for five weeks.

  So, enough already.

• Meanwhile, Chrenkoff puts in proper context Dowd’s “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute�? contention. Because, as much as Sheehan’s grief deserves respect, it does not translate into any more moral authority in terms of being a voice of public policy than any other American’s, as Christopher Hitchens properly noted this week in Slate :
  

  There are, in fact, some principles involved here. Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don’t have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive’s ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders.

  […]

  Finally, I think one must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. Casey Sheehan joined up as a responsible adult volunteer. Are we so sure that he would have wanted to see his mother acquiring “a knack for P.R.” and announcing that he was killed in a war for a Jewish cabal? (a claim that has brought David Duke flying to Ms. Sheehan’s side.) This is just as objectionable, on logical as well as moral grounds, as the old pro-war argument that the dead “must not have died in vain.” I distrust anyone who claims to speak for the fallen, and I distrust even more the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the grief of those who have to bury them.

  Indeed.

  I suppose the bottom line is that Ms. Sheehan has every right to keep up her protest, but I question the idea that her opinion should be treated wit such reverence. If being the parent of a dead soldier makes one more important, then perhaps we should assemble all of those parents in Washington and make them responsible for running the Iraq policy henceforth.

  That makes more sense than the idea that we should take Ms. Sheehan’s call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq seriously. Or that the President of the United States should make time to hear that demand in person.

  As Hitchens notes in his piece (and it is the only place I have noted it), Bush did send National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to meet with Ms. Sheehan—which is more access to the policy process than most citizens get.