Source: Moscow Times
Author: Chris Floyd

08/26/05

In his inaugural speech last January, President George W. Bush repeatedly invoked images of unbridled, ravaging destruction as the emblem of his crusade for ‘freedom.’ Fire was his symbol, his word of power, his incantation of holy war. Mirroring the rhetoric of his fundamentalist enemies, Bush moved the conflict from the political to the spiritual, from the outer world to the inner soul, claiming that he had lit ‘a fire in the minds of men.’ But words are recalcitrant things; they have their own magic, and they will often find their own meanings, outside the intentions of those who use them …. This ‘fire in the mind’ has now found its own symbol in the unlikely figure of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain American soldier. … Sheehan is no professional activist, no savvy insider or political junkie. She’s an ordinary citizen whose unadorned speech has none of the sweep and grandeur of Bush’s expensively tailored rhetoric. But she has one thing that his professional scripters can never put in the presidential mouth: truth...

Link: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/08/26/120.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



Cindy Sheehan
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=Sheehan