Cindy Sheehan II

James Taranto:

The problem, though, is that [Sheehan's] views were at variance with those of any sane person. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Cindy Sheehan is an anti-American crackpot--and "anti-American crackpot opposes Iraq war" is a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

In April, Mrs. Sheehan had appeared at a San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who is awaiting sentencing after conviction on charges of giving material aid to terrorists. There Mrs. Sheehan opined that "we might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden," referred to America as a "morally repugnant system," and said: "This country is not worth dying for."

During her August protest, she gave a speech to an outfit called Veterans for Peace. According to a transcript on the group's Web site, she said that if the President agreed to meet with her:

I'm gonna say, "And you tell me, what the noble cause is that my son died for." And if he even starts to say freedom and democracy I'm gonna say, bullshit. You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don't tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

Cuz, we're not freer. You're taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren't freer, they're much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine.

In September, after Hurricane Katrina had brought her 15 minutes of fame to an end, Sheehan wrote on the Huffington Post website: "George Bush needs to . . . pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq."

All these comments were easily available on the Internet, yet they were seldom mentioned in the news coverage of Mrs. Sheehan's protest. They didn't fit the script--a script in which Mrs. Sheehan was playing the role of an ordinary American whose personal tragedy had turned her against the war.

Exactly.