WashPost Writer Admits: When "Rosa Parks" Sheehan Protested Us, We Ignored Her

Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, in his August 17, 2005 live chat on the topic "[Cindy] Sheehan and the Antiwar Movement," admitted for the record that when Cindy Sheehan “held a protest outside the Post a few weeks ago…for the most part, the media ignored her.” However, now that Sheehan has become an irritant to President Bush and not the media, Milbank compared her favorably with civil rights figure Rosa Parks.

Milbank began the proceedings with an opening statement that included this quip: "...let's get on with the chat and determine, once and for all, whether Cindy Sheehan is Rosa Parks [who began a legendary protest against racial segregation] or Lyndon Larouche [a convicted criminal, infamous conspiracy theorist, and perpetual Presidential candidate].”

Later in that same chat session, a participant from Reading, MA asked the Post scribe: "Is Cindy Sheehan just a passing August media enriched phenomenon or the catalyst of a crisis for the Bush Presidency?” Milbank responded thusly (emphasis ours):

Dana Milbank: That's why I posed the question: Rosa Parks or Lyndon LaRouche?

Certainly Sheehan has caught a wave, and the ranch stakeout was very clever. But she has been seeking publicity for more than a year (she even held a protest outside the Post a few weeks ago because she didn't like something I'd written) and for the most part, the media ignored her.

Milbank chose not to elaborate on what it was upset Sheehan so much that she showed up at the Post building, or the manner in which she protested. With the recent revelation of her previous profane rants against the President (occasionally peppered with "anti-Zionist" rhetoric), might it have sounded like something that would have placed her in the firmly in the "LaRouche" category? We are not given the benefit of knowing.

Nevertheless, Milbank makes it clear where his opinion lies later in the conversation in his meandering response to the following comment:

Arlington, Va.: I'm frustrated by Ms. Sheehan's belief that she deserves a second meeting. She has not provided any good reasons for why she didn't ask her questions in the first meeting. You don't always get a second chance in life and she missed hers. It seems to me that she was disappointed by the quality of attention she was given in the first meeting and would like a do-over.

Dana Milbank: No doubt the request for a second meeting is contrived. It's not as if Sheehan really believes she would change the president's mind. But that's just a vehicle that allows her to set up this camp in Crawford.

In a broader sense, none of the particulars about Sheehan matters: not her remarks about Israel and neocons, not her lefty politics, not her divorce and not whether she's entitled to a second presidential audience. What matters is her ability is to serve as an icon, a symbolic rallying point for an antiwar movement. And all she needs to achieve that is the moral claim she already has, being the mother of a kid who was killed in Iraq.

This seems to argue for Rosa Parks. Any Larouchies out there?

It seems never to have occurred to Milbank that "a few weeks ago," when Sheehan was "seeking publicity" in front of the Post headquarters, she was just as much "the mother of a kid who was killed in Iraq" as she is today. But somehow, it didn't make sense to provide her an audience; she only started to be important enough for coverage when President Bush was the target of her ire, and not the Post.