Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq last year and who wants to talk to President Bush in Texas, met the president in June 2004, two months after her son died. At that meeting, she says, he said he couldn't really understand what she's going through:

By Ms. Sheehan's account, Mr. Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Ms. Sheehan said she broke in and told Mr. Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like since he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.

"I said, 'Trust me, you don't want to go there'," Ms. Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. "He said, 'You're right, I don't.' I said, 'Well, thanks for putting me there.' "

If he really said the loss of a child was hard for him to imagine, that's rather odd, because -- as this hagiographic 1999 Washington Post article notes -- in 1953, when Bush was seven, he watched his own parents mourn the loss of his four-year-old sister, Robin, to leukemia.

The death left indelible scars on the Bushes. Barbara Bush still has trouble talking about her daughter's death. Her husband would cite the experience when he ran for president and was asked if he had ever known hardship. George W.'s eyes welled with tears when discussing his sister in an interview in May....

When Robin had become sick, it was Bush's father who wore his anguish openly, who had to leave the room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer center each time Robin had another transfusion. And it was Barbara Bush who stayed resolutely at their daughter's side in New York, her strength belied only by her hair, which at age 28 began to turn white.

After the couple returned to Midland, Barbara plunged into despair. Her husband tried his best to cheer her up. But he was pulled away by the demands of building an oil business, working long days and traveling frequently. That left Barbara alone with her two children for long stretches. Of the two boys, only George understood what had happened.

As the gloom began to lift from the Bushes' three-bedroom frame house on West Ohio Street, it was their ebullient cutup of a son who, despite his own pain, helped drive it away – joking, playing, working hard to make his mother smile again. Time helped salve Barbara Bush's pain, but so did "Georgie."

Barbara Bush once said it didn't dawn on her what was happening until one day when she heard her son tell a friend that he couldn't come out because he had to play with his mother, who was lonely. "I was thinking, 'Well, I'm being there for him,' " she recalled. "But the truth was he was being there for me." ...

Barbara Bush may be reading a bit more into her son's behavior than was actually there. I lost my father when I was nine and I wasn't consumed with grief (which has always troubled me), so I wonder if Bush was really the empath she says he was. It doesn't sound as if he was, and maybe that's normal -- maybe you're just in your own world at seven or nine.

Nevertheless, he watched his parents live through a child's death, something you'd think would still leave a hole in their hearts. You'd think he'd have grown up feeling their pain. You'd think, then, that he'd have some idea what Cindy Sheehan is feeling.

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UPDATE: In response to Drudge's story "Protesting Soldier Mom Changed Story on Bush," you can now read not only Raw Story's "Drudge Report Takes Anti-War Mom Out of Context" but also the original story both are quoting, which has been re-posted by the Vacaville Reporter. I'd say Raw Story's summary of what Sheehan was thinking in 2004 wins, hands down.