Excerpt from a Salon.com interview with Cindy Sheehan

Salon: You've always been against the war in Iraq, is that right?

CS: Yes.

Salon: And I also want to ask about your son, his feelings about the war.

CS: Casey disagreed with the war. He didn't feel George Bush was using the troops in an effective way. Or in a good way. And I begged him not to go because he knew it was wrong. But he said, "You know what, Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. And my buddies are going."

Salon: Last year you met with the president. Tell me how that came about, and tell me what happened during that meeting.

CS: We were invited by the protocol office at Ft. Lewis, Wash. They said the president wanted to have a sit-down with us. And we decided we wouldn't use that time to debate the war with him. We wanted him to look at Casey, we wanted him to know about Casey, we wanted him to know what an indispensable part of humanity he was.

Salon: Tell me what the president was like during that meeting.

CS: Well, he walked in and he said, "So who are we honorin' here?" He didn't know our name. He totally was disrespectful. He called me "Mom" the whole time. And he said some disrespectful things to us.

Salon: There's been an account of you saying that you did think he was respectful during that meeting. [In June 2004, Sheehan told the Reporter, a newspaper in her home of Vacaville, Calif., that she believed Bush was "sorry" and felt "some pain for our loss."]

CS: Because at the end of the meeting, I said, "What are we doing here, Mr. President? We didn't vote for you in 2000, we're not going to vote for you this time. We're lifelong Democrats."

And he said, "It's not about politics." So we said, OK, we wouldn't use it about politics and we tried to put a positive spin on it. But if you read the whole article you'll see we already had misgivings about what was going on. A lot has been taken out of context.

Salon: Well, you said, "I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis ... I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss." Do you still think he feels some pain for your loss?

CS: No, no, I don't think he does at all. Because it was all about politics. When he talks about how he meets with the families and they say, "Mr. President, we pray for you" -- you know what, that's not true. He used it for politics, because he doesn't go to funerals and stuff like that. That's what it was all about.

Salon: I'm just trying to get a sense, though, when you said that he feels some pain for your loss -- you didn't really mean that then, or at least you don't think that now?

CS: I don't even know what I meant back in June of 2004. I was in shock, I was in grief. I'm still in a deep state of grief but I'm not in shock anymore. When he said it was not about politics I believed him. But he made it all about politics and that's when I stopped believing him.

/end excerpt


Has she changed her mind? Has her perception of President Bush changed? Yes and yes. Does that make her a hypocrite? No.