Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq last year, seems distressed that her anti-Bush protest has become a bit, well, political.

“We need to refocus our mission,” Sheehan said Monday at Camp Casey, the ragtag staging ground she set up nearly two weeks ago near the president’s ranch outside Crawford, Texas. It seems she has become concerned about a “media circus” surrounding her protest.

That statement came barely more than 24 hours after Sheehan wrote, “It was a busy morning of interviews and problem solving. I had interviews with some network shows and a photo shoot for the Vanity Fair article. ...”

She also wrote, “The CBS reporter whom I met last Saturday ... told me that he has interviewed me four times this week already. He told me that he has never, ever interviewed anyone four times, let alone four times in one week. I was joking with reporters that were here last week that they should have brought me flowers on our one-week anniversary.”

Yes, Ms. Sheehan, it is time to refocus.

Whatever the effect of criticism she has received from Bill O’Reilly, or Michelle Malkin, or other commentators on the right, Sheehan herself is proving to be the greatest threat to her protest.

That protest began with real authority. After all, Sheehan suffered a terrible loss. Her son died in the service of the United States. She has a special status to criticize the war if she wants.

But almost from the beginning she proved herself capable of diminishing her own credibility by making a number of off-the-wall public statements and revealing a bit too much in the attention she has received from the press.

Just look at her appearance Monday night on the CNN program hosted by Anderson Cooper.

“Cindy, I was reading some of the essays that you’ve been writing about the war over the last couple of months,” Cooper began. “In one you say the war is blatant genocide and you go on to say, and I quote, ‘Casey was killed in the global war of terrorism waged on the world and its own citizen by the biggest terrorist outfit in the world, George and his destructive neocon cabal.’ Do you really believe the president of the United States is the biggest terrorist in the world?”

The answer was yes. “I believe that he’s responsible for the needless and senseless deaths of more people than any other organization right now,” Sheehan said.

“But when you say that the president, I mean you’re essentially saying the president is a terrorist,” Cooper responded.

The answer was yes. “Well, you know,” Sheehan said, “I’ve heard a lot of — a lot of definitions of that, and it’s the definition they kill innocent people, you know, and his policies are responsible for killing innocent people, and I say the organization is killing innocent people and it needs to stop.”

She didn’t back down from the genocide claim either.
Last week, Sheehan took part in a conference call with antiwar bloggers. She thanked them for their support and added, “Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.”

One party controls the government, Sheehan continued, “and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government.”

Terrorism. Genocide. Fascism. Propaganda. It’s all the rhetoric of the far left — and it’s rhetoric Sheehan has chosen to make a part of her protest.

And now she worries that distractions have arisen at Camp Casey and she needs to refocus her mission.

A few days ago, a college professor and Harper’s magazine contributor named Thomas de Zengotita wrote, on the Huffington Post blog, “I fear a trap at Crawford.”

“I think this was much more powerful when it was just Cindy, all by herself, insisting on an accountability moment.”

“I fear — I hope I’m wrong, I pray I’m wrong — but I fear that the more this turns into a mass of antiwar people gathering at the gate, the more it looks like retro ’60s business as usual and turns into a big blob of whatever that will be grist for all the mills, to be interpreted in accordance with whatever they already think.”

At about the same time de Zengotita was writing those words, a 61-year-old woman from Colorado, who traveled to Crawford to join the protest, was telling The New York Times, “It’s us versus them again. I haven’t felt this since the Vietnam War.”

That’s exactly the point. But de Zengotita was wrong about one thing. When you fear that a trap has been set, you’re afraid that someone is trying to trap you.

In this case, Sheehan set the trap for herself.

She’s emotional. Angry. Given to believing the things she reads on left-wing websites. And dazzled by her newfound popularity with the press.

In other words, her own worst enemy.

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it