You can tell in five minutes channel surfing how Cindy Sheehan frightens the pro-war crowd. One bereaved mom from Vacaville, Calif., camped outside Bush's home in Crawford, reproaching the vacationing president for sending her son to a pointless death in Iraq has got the hellhounds of the Right barking in venomous unison.

Bill O'Reilly just howls about Sheehan's low character in her refusal to pay federal taxes that might put more money the Pentagon's way.

Listening to O'Reilly and even mainstream pundits, you'd think tax-resistance was a fresh and terrible arrival on the shores of American protest instead of a form of resistance as old as the Republic.

But the notion that tax resistance somehow marginalizes Sheehan as an "extremist" does highlight an important point. The aim of any serious anti-war protest is to force a government to quit fighting, pull the troops out and come home right now.

But Sheehan is castigated in the press, by mainstream liberals as well as mad-dog rightists, for not leaving any wriggle-room on this central point. She says, "Bring the troops home right now."

The surge of antiwar voices in U.S. media this month has coincided with new lows in public approval for what pollsters call President Bush’s “handling” of the Iraq war. After more than two years of a military occupation that was supposed to be a breeze after a cakewalk into Baghdad, the war has become a clear PR loser. But an unpopular war can continue for a long time -- and one big reason is that the military-industrial-media complex often finds ways to blunt the effectiveness of its most prominent opponents.

Right now, the pro-war propaganda arsenal of the world’s only superpower is drawing a bead on Cindy Sheehan, who now symbolizes the USA’s antiwar grief. She is a moving target, very difficult to hit. But right-wing media sharpshooters are sure to keep trying.

The Bush administration’s top officials must be counting the days until the end of the presidential vacation brings to a close the Crawford standoff between Camp Casey and Camp Carnage. But media assaults on Cindy Sheehan are just in early stages.

While the president mouths respectful platitudes about the

Aho my relations,

As I sit here in my solitary confinement cell at USP Terre Haute, and reflect over the past month’s events, I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of love and gratitude for each and every one of you who have so diligently stood by me in this time of crisis. As you already know by now, on June 30, 2005, I was transferred from Leavenworth Facility, to Terre Haute USP. The reason for my transfer, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Administrative staff was that the Leavenworth Facility was downgraded from maximum security level to medium, and therefore I could not remain at Leavenworth due to my illegal sentencing and consequent maximum security rank.

On Aug. 14, the New York Times published a piece by Frank Rich under the headline “Someone Tell the President the War Is Over.” The article was a flurry of well-placed jabs about the Bush administration’s lies and miscalculations for the Iraq war. But the essay was also a big straw in liberal wind now blowing toward dangerous conclusions.

Comparing today’s war-related poll numbers for George W. Bush with those for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the columnist writes: “On March 31, 1968, as LBJ’s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.” And Rich extends his Vietnam analogy: “What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson’s March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam.”

But Rich does not linger over the actual meaning of the “plan for retreat” and the “long extrication” -- which meant five more years of massive U.S. military assaults in Vietnam, followed by two more years of military aid to the Saigon government while fighting continued. The death

[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.