CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that
ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001
Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing
titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going
fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad
news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside
bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of
Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms.
Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the
setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the
United States in 2001.

When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts. But
when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer
be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove
tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White
House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift
Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a
president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other
priorities" during Vietnam.
The most prominent smear victims have been Bush
political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John
Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism
czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly
challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December.
The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the
first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting
Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its
perpetrators to jail.

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where
she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing
blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws,
her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her
association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush
Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more
than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet
another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political
support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest
priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character,
then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to
terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal
media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate
armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we
focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration
twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's
"wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached
themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son.
But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's
what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with
her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure
even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never
returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the
media circus by actually meeting with her.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not
the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost
never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's
life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to
fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who
gave the marching orders....

Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't exist."

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the Union speech.)

Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans' sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral services for the military dead. It's why January's presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the Inaugural Address.