Dana Milbank is livechatting with Washington Post readers about Cindy Sheehan. Here’s Milbank’s key observation so far:

No doubt the request for a second meeting is contrived. It’s not as if Sheehan really believes she would change the president’s mind. But that’s just a vehicle that allows her to set up this camp in Crawford. In a broader sense, none of the particulars about Sheehan matters: not her remarks about Israel and neocons, not her lefty politics, not her divorce and not whether she’s entitled to a second presidential audience. What matters is her ability is to serve as an icon, a symbolic rallying point for an antiwar movement. And all she needs to achieve that is the moral claim she already has, being the mother of a kid who was killed in Iraq.

Milbank has a good track record of reporting on Sheehan and her crazy cohort. In fact, he mentions in the livechat that Sheehan once protested outside the Post because she didn’t like something he wrote — no doubt his story mocking House Democrat Rep. John Conyers for holding a fake impeachment hearing over the Downing Street Memos, at which Cindy Sheehan “testified.”

PostWatch is liveblogging.