Word To You Mother

When Cindy Sheehan first appeared on the national stage, most Americans were willing to cut her a lot of slack. After all, she had lost a son in Iraq and we could empathize with the searing pain and indescribable sorrow that follow the loss of a child.

Over recent months, that slack has slowly but surely disappeared. From the camp out in Waco to chaining herself to the White House to threatening to run for Senate if Dianne Feinstein didn't support the Alito filibuster, Sheehan has lost whatever credibility she once had as a grieving mother and is increasingly viewed as nothing but a tool of hard-Left radical activists. For me, the last straw was when she traveled to Venezuela to play kissy face with Hugo Chavez, one of the leading voices of anti-Americanism in the world today. Don't mean to dare question your patriotism Cindy, but playing footsie with a self-declared enemy of our country leads one to be a bit skeptical about your motives.

I don't think my feelings towards Sheehan are by any means unique among conservatives. That depths of that animosity was amply demonstrated last night at The Patriot Forum with Michael Medved. After Medved opened with a half-hour on why elections are so close these days (not just in the US), the audience watched the State of the Union on the very big screen at the auditorium. Fox News of course.

It was an interesting experience to catch the SOTU with an enthusiastic and partisan crowd. During the speech itself, there were a number of moments when the audience erupted in applause, a few people even choosing to imitate the action on the screen by rising to their feet at appropriate moments.

But the most notable reaction, the line that elicited the loudest cheering and hollering from the crowd occurred before the speech began when one of the Fox talking heads (possibly my dog Shep Smith) announced that Cindy Sheehan had been arrested. Suffice it to say that the place went wild with the news. Medved had earlier clued us in that Rep. Lynn Woolsey intended to bring Sheehan to the speech with her and there was an expectation that she would do something untoward in an attempt to disrupt the speech. Part of the crowd's reaction was no doubt relief that such a disruption would not occur, but most of it was likely a release of pent up frustration with the way that Sheehan has been anointed by the media as this untouchable paragon of moral authority who was beyond criticism no matter how outrageous her views were.

Finally, people had a chance to express their true feelings about Cindy Sheehan. The patience is gone. The empathy has disappeared. The understanding has reached its end. There isn't any more slack in the line for mother Sheehan.