The Revolution is Now, Activism, by S. Samples,

The Revolution is NOW...

By Sheila Samples

"If you shut up the truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
-- French author Emile Zola

The incomparable Raw Story website is publishing a letter it acquired on Tuesday, Aug 9, from 16 Democratic Representatives (whose number has now burgeoned to 38) urging George Bush to meet with Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was slain in Iraq in 2002. Sheehan has been camped on Bush's doorstep since Saturday when she and a small group of supporters were forced to walk in a ditch struggling through knee-deep weeds as they made their way to Prairie Chapel, the Bush "ranch," a former pig farm in Crawford, Texas.

According to The Iconoclast, Bush's hometown paper, Sheehan said she decided to go to Crawford because of comments Bush made which coincided with the deaths of 12 Marine reservists from Ohio who were killed in perhaps the deadliest roadside bombing of U.S. troops in Iraq. Sheehan was outraged at Bush's remarks to about 1,800 members of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Grapevine on Aug 3 that the men and women who've lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan died in a noble and selfless cause.

"We all know by now that that's not true, and I want to ask George Bush, 'Why did my son die? What was the noble cause that he died for?'" said Sheehan. "I don't want [President Bush] to use my son's name or my family name to justify any more killing or to exploit my son's name, my son's sacrifice, or my son's honor to justify more killing. As a mother, why would I want one more mother to go through what I'm going through, Iraqi or American?

for more see
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=22307
Sheila Samples: 'It all started at the pig farm'
Date: Thursday, August 11 @ 10:29:09 EDT
Topic: Activism

---To New York Times Editor, March 11
To the Editor:

Maureen Dowd, in "Why No Tea and Sympathy?" (column, Aug. 10), says, referring to Cindy Sheehan, a California woman whose son was killed in Iraq last year, "It's amazing that the White House does not have the elementary shrewdness to have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear the woman out, or invite her in for a cup of tea."

I do not find this the least bit surprising, let alone amazing.

President Bush's handlers won't let him do what Ms. Dowd suggests for the same reasons they would not let him testify alone before the 9/11 commission and will not let him get within earshot of anyone who disagrees with him.

They realize that the president is someone who is totally driven by unquestioned belief, is disdainful of empirical truths, and most important, lacks the native intelligence to engage in unscripted give-and-take without embarrassing himself.

The most frightening aspect of this whole scenario may be that President Bush may have no idea what Ms. Sheehan is so upset about.

Kenneth Berger
Englewood, N.J., Aug. 10, 2005