As we all know, Cindy Sheehan received not one but two life insurance cheques from the US Department of Defense for the death of her son Casey. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet even as Cindy Sheehan remarks that until now she has never owned a new car (she bought herself a Beetle, a convertible no less), Casey Sheehan's grave has no marker.

Needless to say, this has a lot of people upset.

One of those people is Cindy Sheehan, but not for the same reason, of course:

I am so tired of the Rovian, heartless, and ignorant smear machine attacking me and my family at every turn of my back.

The latest abomination in their scrutiny of my life is the fact that Casey has no "tombstone." As if it were anybody's business but Casey's family. I am sure every last person who has a problem with this has buried a child and they know what we are going through.

I am being smeared because I have a new car and I have "blown" through "$250,000.00" dollars of Casey's insurance money. I am sure that they have ready access to my bank accounts, too.

Is it our business? Maybe not, but then what should be a private matter for any family -- the death of a son, his final arrangements -- has become a public spectacle thanks to Cindy Sheehan, who is using Casey's sacrifice (he re-enlisted in the Army after the war in Iraq began, recall) as the ammunition for her private war against a "so-called, illegitimate president".

As distasteful as it is, she has forced us to examine her dealings.

What is interesting in her posting is that she claims he is being smeared for spending the money. And yet she does not correct us on the amount she received, though she puts "$250,000.00" in quotes to suggest that it is a spurious figure. And throughout the rest of the essay, she does not refute the smear -- she does not tell us where the money, whatever the amount, went to. It was life insurance money -- it is intended to be used to cover the costs of the final arrangements for the deceased.

So where did the money go? All we know is that she has a new car, and Casey's grave lies unmarked. So what of the final arrangements?

In classic Cindy style, what should be a private matter becomes an excuse to attack her enemies:

I will tell the world why Casey has no marker yet. In the first place, does anyone who is attacking me know how Casey was brought home from Iraq? We picked him up in the United loading dock in a cardboard box and he was off-loaded into a hearse without one honor guard. We had to wait for about a half hour on a curb near the United freight area for his one escort, who rode from Dover Air Force Base in a seat, while Casey was treated as an over-sized piece of luggage. Has anybody held her other sobbing children who are sitting on a curb in San Francisco, waiting for the remains of their big brother to be carried over to the dock by a forklift?

A cardboard box? That's cold. It's also not true, as we learn from Gateway Pundit:

After making a couple of calls, I talked with MAJ OCPA Nathan Banks at the Pentagon’s Department of Media Relations who was very helpful. This is what I found out:

Cardboard boxes are never use to transfer soldiers!

"Crates" have not been used since Vietnam. Fallen soldiers today are moved in steel or aluminum caskets to their home of record (hometown). Further, the escort inspects the casket when it is unloaded. Since arrangements are made before each fallen soldier arrives to their home of record, the military would be shocked to hear that a forklift was used.

In fact, Casey was sent home in a hardwood casket. Cardboard is used to cover the casket to protect it during shipment.

But then it's not just the military whom she attacks. The funeral home director is attacked as well:

We had a Casualty Officer who abandoned us when our mortuary refused to pay the cemetery and told us that the "government sent the money to the mortuary, so now it is your problem. You may have to sue the mortuary." Our government discards and dishonors its own.

Again, not true:

A Vacaville funeral home owner took exception to "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan's allegation that his mortuary did not fulfill its duties after her son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

In her blog last week, Sheehan wrote that the mortuary had refused to pay the cemetery as it was supposed to. Steve Nadeau, the mortuary's owner, said Monday that not only did he properly pay the cemetery, but that he subsidized the process with his own money.

In an e-mail sent to The Reporter Sunday, Nadeau expressed hurt and disbelief at Sheehan's comments. He said that the amount of money the military gave the mortuary for Casey's funeral service and cemetery arrangements didn't even come close to covering the costs.

"Several kind citizens made donations," said Nadeau. "I absorbed the rest."

This was not the only way in which he went above and beyond his responsibilities following Casey's death, said Nadeau. He also provided a stretch limousine and a driver at his expense, he said, and invited the family to go to the airport with him so that he could accompany them. None of this was required, said Nadeau.

"Having known the Sheehan family for many years through St. Mary's Catholic Church where Ms. Sheehan had previously been the youth director, it was my desire to provide care and dignity to Casey and the family. I did this in every respect.""Having known the Sheehan family for many years through St. Mary's Catholic Church where Ms. Sheehan had previously been the youth director, it was my desire to provide care and dignity to Casey and the family. I did this in every respect."

But the truth shouldn't stand in the way of a classic Cindy Sheehan rant:

There are many people whom the Bush regime has killed, either directly or indirectly, by their murderous policies: there are people buried under rubble of Iraq and who were buried under the rubble of the World Trade Towers, and if their families were lucky they could find small parts to bury, before their remains were carted away in the enormous trucks and barges; there are people still unaccounted-for in the swamps of New Orleans and in refrigerated trucks in Mississippi that will never even have graves, let alone gravestones. The Bush regime is good for business, all right; especially the funeral business.

Did Cindy Sheehan just blame George W Bush for the attacks of 9/11? I wonder if Samuel Bostaph had this in mind when he said "mere association in a common cause does not connote a commonality of views on other matters". I'm not sure I'd be comfortable standing side-by-side with someone like that, giving credibility, even just implicitly, to claims like those.

So was Cindy Sheehan short-changed by the US military and the local funeral director? Steve Nadeau and the people of Vacaville would say clearly not. But then they are probably part of the "Rovian smear machine".

Cat Moy, a reporter for the Vacaville Reporter, has had a different experience with this nefarious funeral director:

My mother died at 3 a.m. a couple days before Christmas, 1998. She was at Kaiser hospital in Vallejo and succumbed to complications of diabetes. Before I left for the hospital to gather my mother’s things, I called Steve Nadeau, owner of the Nadeau Family Funeral home in Vacaville.

I will never forget his kindness. It was remarkable, especially at 3:20 in the morning when most people wouldn’t appreciate a phone call.

Steve prepared her so we could see her one last time. He handled everything from the graveyard to the monument. He was professional and made bearable this horrible time in my life.

So I couldn’t believe the story on the front page of this newspaper on Easter. Former Vacaville resident Cindy Sheehan made allegations against Steve, whose business handled the funeral for her son, Casey. Terrorists killed Casey in Iraq two years ago.

I wasn’t shocked. Sheehan is known for outrageous and untrue statements. When somebody blames her for anything, she tries to turn the tables and deflect criticism. That’s what happened here.

No. 1: Sheehan claimed that the military sent Casey home in a cardboard box. Fact: Cardboard covered Casey’s hardwood casket for protection. But soldiers removed the cardboard before the casket was placed into the hearse.

No. 2: Sheehan claimed that Nadeau didn’t promptly pay for the gravesite. Fact: Nadeau has the receipts showing otherwise.

No. 3:Sheehan claimed that the military treated Casey’s body “as an over-sized piece of luggage.” Nadeau said that everybody took great care. The soldiers even wept as they moved the casket.

“My personal feeling is that she took advantage of every good-hearted person and blamed them in the hope of sweeping her issue under the carpet,” Nadeau said. “I was there from the beginning and I had no bad experience from anybody, from the airport and the church, to the media and the good people of Vacaville. It was like an absolute dignitary’s funeral.”

So what of Casey's grave? It will soon be marked with dignity, no thanks to Cindy Sheehan:

In a phone call Monday, Sheehan stood by her allegations. Sheehan also said that Casey's grave site was now being handled by her soon-to-be ex-husband Patrick.

Patrick Sheehan said Monday that the small plaque currently marking Casey's grave is something all graves receive before a headstone is constructed. Casey's headstone is in the works, he said, and is being built by a local monument company.

It's been two years, and Cindy Sheehan continues to attack everyone within sight.

I've been accused of essentially manufacturing criticisms based on imagined evidence. In fact, that has never been true...until now.

What I'm about to say is entirely my own imagining, a speculation with absolutely no data to back it up. Call it a feeling.

That Cindy Sheehan's behaviour seems to grow more extreme, not less, over time suggests that this is not grief-driven. Grief dulls over time. Instead, Cindy Sheehan acts like someone on a mission (a radical political mission), and I suspect that the mission started well before Casey went to Iraq. I say that based in part on hints I've gleaned from private discussions with people close to Cindy Sheehan. Seen in this light, Casey's death is not the cause of Cindy Sheehan's behaviour, but I would suggest the opposite -- Cindy Sheehan's behaviour was what inspired Casey to enlist. If you accept that speculation as at least possible, then the line of responsibility for Casey's death goes in very different direction than to the White House, assuming you are seeking to blame someone other than the terrorists themselves.

Now that's nasty.

You might not like it, and I can't say I know that I'm right, and I might very well be wrong, but it makes a certain sort of sense. It certainly would explain the way in which Cindy Sheehan seems to be unable to come to terms with her grief, for the simple reason that grief is not the prime mover here. Radical political activism is, and that won't fade with time, since the motivator is the fact that America is not a socialist paradise, and not that Casey is dead.

I really hope I'm wrong, but with the way Cindy Sheehan sees everything through the prism of her anti-Bush paranoia, I have to wonder if I'm the right track here. Casey's death is not a turning point in her life, but the latest confirmation of her political bias. Now imagine you are Casey growing up in an environment in which everything is seen through the prism of politics.

What would that be like? Consider the experience of Leila Mouammar, the daughter of Khaled Mouammar, a Palestinian activist. Leila was born and raised in Toronto, but she might as well have been born in Ramallah:

[Leila] Mouammar describes it more as a shared sense of hopelessness and despair. "The fatalism gets deeper," she says, lighting yet another smoke. It's a burden the whole community carries. She talks about her own family, how the television is always tuned to CNN, how holidays have been ruined by events in the Middle East, how she spends so much time thinking about the crisis that she often can't sleep. "It taints the way I look at the world," she says. "Everything is political. Sometimes I think, wouldn't it have been nice to grow up an Anglo-Saxon and not care about anything?"

You can read more about the Mouammar clan here.

Did Casey ever wonder what it would be like to not be subjected to a constant stream of Cindy Sheehan's anti-American political activism? Did he look for another family, a family that believed in America? Did he find that family in the US Army?

Like I said, I have nothing to substantiate this whatsoever. But since I've been charged and already found guilty of making stuff up, I figured I might as well indulge myself.