It's a disease that afflicted the first cave man when he was applauded for bringing down a hairy mammoth with a stone and thereafter was impossible to endure because of his bloated ego.
The curse is celebrity. It eventually strikes film stars, rock idols, athletes, politicians, tycoons who fall victim to praise and their press clippings, and then hit the skids.
Cindy Sheehan, the mother whose son died in Iraq and who became the leader of the first genuine anti-Iraq war movement with noticeable national momentum and a following, is taking that slide. She had a good thing going. Then self-perception that she's bigger than reality began poisoning her good judgment.
Sheehan talked of running against California's Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein for being a patsy by supporting the war. Feinstein isn't alone: Democrats and Republicans alike were lured into backing the Iraq attack because of vivid doomsday forecasts brewed by President Bush. Besides, what does Sheehan have to offer California voters beside her rage and sorrowful, unwitting role as the grief-stricken mother of a dead GI?
Then she showed up for the six-day World Social Forum in Caracas, sucking up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, spewing invective to communists and socialists about President Bush being a "terrorist" guilty of war crimes. According to an Agence France-Presse news report, the crowd sang the communist "Internationale" and praised Cuba's aging Marxist dictator, Fidel Castro.
It's as if Sheehan is in a delirium, believing she's conquered U.S. public opinion and deserves a seat in the U.S. Senate before attending to one unfinished goal -- hobnobbing with leftist extremists and revolutionaries to find stardom as an international peace movement leader.
Cindy Sheehan can kiss her crusade at home against the war goodbye. Legitimate U.S. war critics don't need her and will avoid her. Her credentials are now as soiled as that global gadfly Ramsay (or Ramsey) Clark, whose latest foolishness is legal adviser to Saddam Hussein.
The war in Iraq needs critics. Had Sheehan stuck with the issues and facts as thoughtful critics in Congress have -- and not gone into a trance about her self-importance -- she could've conducted a respected, respectable discourse on flawed policy in Iraq.
But when she turned to the likes of Fidel Castro's followers and congenital foreign foes of the United States for succor and an audience, she showed her ultimate weakness and ambition -- to be a world celebrity turning her back on a crusade at home that honored the death of her son.
Pat Murphy
