Other Columns by Kevin Fobbs
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When Cindy Sheehan first camped down on August 6th in the president's hometown of Crawford, Texas, she was a barely noticed footnote on the daily news. Here was a grieving mother who had lost her son in the Iraqi War. Most of the nation who heard about her came to feel a sense of lost themselves, because the media was showing this tortured mother's soft voice, cracking at times as she presented her seemingly innocent case to America, with her target squarely set on the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

She told us that she simply wanted to share her feelings with the president. She had lost her son, and she just wanted a simple meeting with the president. The media managers in the background did not want her to be combative, did not want her to engage in open heckling...because that would drive her negatives way, way down and after all this was the president's summer home and some decorum would have to be followed.

What this innocent request of a mom tortured by the memory of her son did not show was the incredible media and political operation which was just waiting stage left, formulating, generating, manufacturing and tailoring an incredible anti-war hype machine, so well tailored and scripted that many Americans probably just wanted to stand up from their backyard barbeques and simply salute it.

But, just what were they saluting?

After all, this American mother simply wanted to share her honest feelings with the president. She had traveled from her hometown to plead her case to her son's former Commander In Chief. She wanted to sit down with the president and have him explain to her, why he had died and why he had fought in an unjust war, but it seems that she was not really prepared to listen to the president, because her conclusions had already been reached.

Cindy Sheehan, whom some in the anti-war movement have equated to the legendary civil rights warrior, Rosa Parks, has framed a new message for America. Does she represent all the grieving parents of America's Iraqi and Afghanistan war dead? What is she truly attempting to accomplish?

We don't know and she is not saying. We do know that this innocently crafted mystique that surrounded her initial request is not so innocent and also not so mysterious. Her media generated demand to have a sit down with the president was not to be her first but her second meeting with the president. You see, she actually had her first meeting with the president and parents of other soldiers who had also lost loved ones in battle.

This same martyred mother of the new anti-war movement actually had a different story to tell to the American public after her first meeting on June 24th of 2004 with the president. She told reporters that "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."

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