Cindy Sheehan, mother of the US Army Specialist killed in Iraq last year and currently camped outside President Bush’s Crawford retreat demanding a face-to-face meeting. Yes, it’s Christopher “The Hitch” Hitchens in Slate dismissing the woman’s efforts to get “some more face-time with our chief executive.”Of course, Hitchens manages to season his hatchet job with some tangential erudition–thereby stressing the gap between his diamond-sharp ratiocination and Sheehan’s sometimes unfocused accusations (“sinister piffle” in the words of CH)–and even name drops Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII’s meet-up in Canossa.While it’s not unreasonable to question Sheenan’s statements, it does seem slightly eerie how astutely the attack dogs have been sicced on her–as if the right-wing bloggers shared a gestalt brain � la The Midwich Cuckoos. (The Drudge Report has been particularly indefatigable in rubbishing the woman.) And just as the consciousness-raising exercise among the Support-Our-Troops bumpersticker brigade seems like an orchestrated counter-attack, there’s a whiff of covering all the bases by getting Hitchens to wade in and lend a bit of “Oggsford” class to the mugging.