USA Today sports columnist Ian O’Connor decided to wade into the Sheehan controversy and in the process demonstrated clearly that he needs to stick to covering golf:

Bush didn’t need to keep his Tour-de-Farce date with [Lance] Armstrong even if Cindy Sheehan had left “Camp Casey,” named for her fallen son, to be with her ailing mother. No president refusing to spend an hour with the parent of a dead soldier should spend a day basking in the glow of a cycling champ.

O’Connor fails to note that Bush already met with Sheehan, and that Sheehan is not just “the parent of a dead soldier” like so many others: She has no interest in hearing anything President Bush has to say, and she is using this phony “request for a meeting” in order to co-opt the press and use it as a megaphone for her anti-war views. Most recently, as I reported in the post below, Sheehan called the foreign terrorists who are coming into Iraq in order to kill innocent Iraqi civilians “freedom fighters” (six minutes into the video, in response to a question from CBS News reporter Mark Knoller).

O’Connor says the president has “lost his fastball.” In keeping with O’Connor’s reliance on cheesy sports metaphors, O’Connor looks like Michael Jordan trying to play baseball. Stick to what you know, Ian, and go back to writing about Tiger Woods’ struggles with water hazards.