Not the Retiring Kind

By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

As a retiree, Cindy Sheehan was the Michael Jordan of the peace movement.

"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," she announced in her May 29 "resignation letter" as antiwar activist. "Good-bye America."

The retirement -- and Sheehan's attempt to "be normal," as she put it -- lasted exactly 34 days. On July 2, she un-retired after hearing that President Bush had commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. And yesterday, bullhorn in hand, she led a march of demonstrators from Arlington National Cemetery to the Capitol, where she ended the day by getting arrested.

Today, she plans to announce that she will run against Nancy Pelosi in next year's congressional election because the House speaker won't pursue impeaching Bush. Then there's Sheehan's trip to Syria and Iraq next month.

"I had to get back into it," she said yesterday, wearing an "Impeach Bush" T-shirt and clutching the familiar white cross with the plastic rose on it that she uses to symbolize the death in Iraq of her soldier-son, Casey.

What -- you thought she was going to play shuffleboard?

Sheehan's return to the workforce has come with occupational hazards. The left-wing Daily Kos Web site banned her postings because of her challenge to Pelosi. Britain's Guardian newspaper, which has a large antiwar following, ran an article titled "The epic narcissism of Cindy Sheehan."

Sheehan, in her no-longer-operative resignation statement, said her troubles began "when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party." Actually, her troubles have more to do with the hug and the promise of help she received from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, to whom she described Bush as a "terrorist."

But there can be no doubt that Sheehan has a voracious appetite when it comes to eating her own.

"If Nancy Pelosi doesn't do her constitutionally mandated job by midnight tonight, tomorrow I will announce that I am going to run against her," Sheehan announced outside the cemetery's gates yesterday. "I will beat her in California."

Sheehan then waded into constitutional law, and the little- known mandatory impeachment clause. "Impeachment is not a fringe movement -- it is mandated in our Constitution," she asserted. "Nancy Pelosi had no authority to take it off the table. If she takes impeachment off the table, what else will she take off the table -- the First Amendment?"

Probably won't be necessary. Pelosi routinely gets more than 80 percent of the vote in her San Francisco district. "How many do we have here actually from the district I'll be running in?" Sheehan asked the crowd of not quite 300.

Nobody responded. "Well, I guess you're going to have to move there," Sheehan proposed.

Her fellow marchers were equally fratricidal as they chanted slogans against Pelosi ("You can't run, you can't hide! Cindy Sheehan's right behind!) and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.): "Conyers, Conyers, you are able! Put impeachment on the table!"

One of the activists, David Swanson, wore fake blood on his hands and explained the march to the ultraliberal Conyers's office: "We are going to be there to demand impeachment, and if we do not get it, we are not going to leave."

A man wearing a Bush mask and red tights and carrying a devil's pitchfork delivered a harsh judgment on his fellow marchers. "They're not going to get anywhere," he said.

He was right: Congressional leaders have ruled out impeachment as a waste of time that -- even if it were somehow successful -- would serve only to elevate Vice President Cheney. But the bleak prospects did not seem to dim Sheehan's joy as she returned to active duty. She received hugs, handshakes and even jewelry from fellow activists. She wore short pants that showed the ankle tattoos of her son's name and the Chinese symbol for heaven.

"So, um, I was retired," she told the crowd, to scattered laughter, "and I retired because I believed that myself and my group had gone as far as we could."

But Libby changed all that, and by yesterday Sheehan even thought the planes departing from National Airport were conspiring against her. "They stepped up the air traffic," she complained as a jet interrupted her speech.

The paranoid also may have been suspicious about the low-flying military helicopter as the marchers crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge, or the man in the car with U.S. government plates who took pictures of the demonstrators as they reached the Tidal Basin -- "for personal use," he claimed.

And marchers certainly had reason to beware of the conservatives from Free Republic who held a poster of Osama bin Laden claiming Sheehan as his "best friend," and the war widows who ambushed Sheehan in the Rayburn House Office Building.

But Sheehan could not afford to dwell on her enemies; she was busy antagonizing her erstwhile friend, the antiwar Conyers. As police kept order among her fellow activists in the hallway, she waited in the congressman's office for more than an hour before he met with her. When, as expected, Conyers refused to budge, Sheehan planted herself until police led her off in plastic handcuffs.

Counting on her fingers, Sheehan said it was the eighth time she'd been arrested -- but her first since retirement.

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