OBSRVATION: What is with Cindy Sheehan?

I have been involved in public issues for two score, and like to think of myself as one of those who can respect opinions I do not share -- and even like the people who express them.

I generally support President Bush on the rationale and necessity of the war in Iraq. I have many good friends who disagree. I have had many a civilized debates with such friends, leaving the discussion with the same friendship and respect with which I entered it.

Then there is Cindy Sheehan, the crusading mother of one of our fallen heroes. I would rather spend eternity tied to my old school desk while tormentors scratch the blackboard than to listen to her shrill voice screeching out inanities. Her camera-petrified dropping face is an assault to my eyes. The intelligence quotient of her argument is as close to zero as is humanly possible.

She brings out my least generous side. I even wonder if her son's enlistment was not a means of getting away from "mommy dearest," and if the flight of her husband was not a rational act of self preservation. Oh, I know these are terrible thoughts, and I am at a lost to know why she so readily conjures them.

It is not as if I have to deal with her real person on a day-to-day basis. I need no military enlistment or divorce to keep her at distance. I am fortunate to only have to turn the page or change the channel to have her removed from my presence.

As I ponder my own reactions, I know that part of it is my belief that she is now overtaken by her own ego -- caring no longer for the cause, those other soldiers, the truth, or even her son. She has defined her whole being in her narrow mission. Everything else is a pretext.

Virtually no one in authority agrees with her "pull out now" position. Certainly not those of us who believe that the war was necessary, weapons of mass destruction not withstanding. But, even those who originally opposed the war reject instant withdrawal. They, too, understand that abandonment now would create not a safer world, but rather would give reign to an orgy of political violence, the collapse of Iraq into a terrorist anarchy, destabilize the middles east, wreak havoc on the world's oil-dependent economies and increase acts of terrorism within these United States.

While I take comfort in the fact that her pleas will go unheeded by the rationale and responsible world, the fact that she would give aid and comfort to our enemies maybe at the root of my uncharacteristic animus. Or maybe my realization that her egotistical malevolence or pathetic stupidity will only embolden the madmen to step up their killing efforts. To the extent she gives hope to those maniacal killers, she will cause more of our soldiers ... and more innocent civilians ... to be brutally and ruthlessly slaughtered.

The war in Iraq will ... and must be continued. Cindy Sheehan's only contribution will be to increase the number of American soldiers returning home in body bags, and the number of unsuspecting men, women and children blown to bits.

Maybe the fact that I have a grandson in the front line in Iraq ... maybe that is why I find her so very offensive. I do not want him to be one of Cindy Sheehan's victims. I wish she would have the decency to go home in silence ... and stay there.