Ann Coulter (on her Sweetness and Light blog) tracks down grief-maddened Cindy Sheehan’s (thanks for the Pieta-pic, Cox and Forkum, via Little Green Footballs) explanation for that letter to ABC’s Ted Koppel’s producer attributed her that’s making the rounds of the ‘sphere. Cindy denies writing the letter–or at least the part of the letter that says her 24-year-old serviceman-son, Casey, “died for Israel.”


Cindy’s latest word on the Koppel letter is to be found–guess where?–on Michael Moore’s website, and she claims that Koppel himself probably doctored the letter! Here’s Cindy’s ramble:



Another ‘big deal’ today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that. I had supposedly said it in a letter that I wrote to Ted Koppel’s producer in March. I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a Nightline Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted Bettag and cc?d a copy to the person who gave me Ted’s address. I believe he changed the email and sent it out to capitalize on my new found notoriety by promoting his own agenda. Enough about that.


Changed the e-mail? As Ann (who dubs Cindy “Mother Sheehan”) points out, the posting of Cindy’s letter, on the obscure site Usernet, took place with Cindy’s foreknowledge and approval. Here’s an excerpt from the site’s version of the e-mail that poster Tony Tersh sent Cindy before he put her letter up:



Skeeter asked me to send ou[t] your letter to Nightline.  I did already and believe you got a copy, as below.


And at any rate, as Ann notes, the e-mail is hardly the only occasion on which Cindy has indulged in anti-Jewish rhetoric, such as this example, taken from a post by Cindy on Mothers Against the Draft:



[My son] was killed for a neo-con agenda that only benefits a very chosen few in this world. This agenda and their war machine will chew up and spit out as many of our children as they can unless we stop them now.



We should not let Israel/USA invade Syria or Iran.


A very “chosen” few? Nice choice of words (so to speak), Cindy. And, of course, there’s this:



  
You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll stop the terrorism.


But of course we all know that Cindy Sheehan speaks with “absolute…moral authority.”


Update: The title “Mother Sheehan” isn’t Ann’s after all. It was invented by one of Cindy’s devotees on Daily Kos (hat tip: Little Green Footballs). I think the model was Mother Jones (not the magazine but the miner-matriarch), which says something about the current level of Sheehanidolatry.