Cindy Sheehan hits the nail on the head. Again.....

[laughingwillow]

I can really relate to the way CS feels right now concerning our country and society in general.


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525

"Good Riddance Attention Whore"
by CindySheehan

Mon May 28, 2007 at 09:57:01 AM PDT

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called "Face" of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such "liberal blogs" as the Democratic Underground. Being called an "attention whore" and being told "good riddance" are some of the more milder rebukes.

CindySheehan's diary :: ::
I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party.  This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an "attention whore" then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford , Texas ? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too...which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. This is not my "Checkers" moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

[mconlonx]

I agree with much of what she says. All those haterz out there will now ridicule her for giving up. I absolutely don't blame her, but it's a real shame that more people aren't doing the same as she did--speak out for her ideals. She might have more impetus than a lot of us, and because of her dead soldier son, more media cache, but what she did is something any of us can do.

The silent majority do not support either party.

[cenacle]

I love Cindy Sheehan. I have admired her actions and her writings since she stood nearly alone two summers ago in Crawford and faced down a cowardly, owned, fake man with Presidential powers. She is soft-voiced, intelligent, funny, a person I wish I could know, comfort, befriend.

She is doing what she has to do. She is tired, sad, broke. Broken. She took on everything and got beaten pretty hard. I wish she had more of a support group around her so she wouldn't feel so exposed and now needing to retreat so badly. But she is strong. She will endure.

What she did two summers ago will remain an historical fact and a brave human act of defiance. Remember the man who stood in front of the tank in China? On that level. What she does now I hope has much to do with healing.

I foresee an end to the War in the autumn not because of moral reasons, but expedient ones. The Republicans have to ditch the disastrous legacy of George W Bush. I don't think they will. Not in the least. The Democrats have to spine up enough to convince the progressive movement to support their candidates in 2008. It's pathetic, all of it. Beyond tragedy.

Cindy, I love you. You are a good person, and I wish you every good thing in your life. Nobody can cure your grief, but we can send our deepest regard from afar, and promise that the fight isn't over.

Now go home, rest. Eat some good food. Listen to some good music. Grieve. Stay alive, and in time, more than that...if you choose someday to return to public life in some capacity, many people will be cheering.

[cenacle]

Why Cindy Sheehan ‘Retired’
by Laura Flanders

Published on Friday, June 1, 2007 by The Guardian/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/01/1587/

Cindy Sheehan’s done it again. In 2005 she made the invisible visible. The bereaved mom of a US soldier killed in Iraq, Sheehan cried in public, cursed in public and gave public voice to what for many was until then a private question. Why did my son die, she asked the president: “What is the noble cause?”

Two years later, Sheehan’s pushed another question into the public glare. Quitting the Democratic Party and resigning from the front ranks of the US anti-war movement, Sheehan said out loud what hundreds of Democratic voters have been muttering: Democrats in Congress -who do you think you’re working for?

In a letter to Democratic leaders shortly after they permitted a vote in Congress that approved $120 billion more for war, Sheehan wrote: “There is absolutely no sane or defensible reason for you to hand Bloody King George more money to condemn more of our brave, tired, and damaged soldiers and the people of Iraq to more death and carnage.”

The president’s never been more unpopular, nor has his Iraq war. Yet a majority of Democrats in both houses voted “aye” to keep the funding flowing.

Speaking with me on Air America Radio soon afterwards, Sheehan called it a betrayal. “Before they came into power they told me it was because they were in the minority. Now it’s because they’re the majority? What stakes do they have in keeping this occupation going?” Given the choice of funding an unpopular war or being accused by the right wing vitriol machine of “abandoning the troops,” 86 Democrats in the House and all but 14 in the Senate voted to sacrifice more troops. Sheehan called that playing “party politics with human lives.”

In hot water with liberal defenders of the party, Sheehan formally “resigned” as the public face of the anti-war movement a few days later. “Good-bye America,” she wrote in a posting on a liberal blog. “You are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.”

It’s easy to understand her despair. The day of Sheehan’s “resignation” - Memorial Day - would have been her son Casey’s 28th birthday. A year ago, she says she almost died from overwork. It’s no wonder she’s taking a break.

But Sheehan is no more the US peace movement than Democratic leaders are America. The fact is, much as the US media love - or love to hate - a solo leader, what was remarkable about her 2005 vigil outside the president’s ranch in Crawford, for example, were the thousands of anti-war Americans it brought into the public eye.

Military moms and dads and suburban people of faith came out to sweat that summer by her side, because, as one computer programmer from Orlando told me, “She got us off our couches and gave us something to do besides worry.”

Sheehan triggered an outpouring of popular grief and rage that until that moment had been silenced and hidden by a regime that even banned photographs of dead soldiers’ coffins arriving home. That grief has only grown. Today, two thirds of the US public opposes the war, as does the majority of active-duty servicemen and women deployed.

The Democrats’ victory last November is no coincidence. As I discovered as I traveled the country for my book, Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics From the Politicians, thousands of grassroots people just like the military parents who drove to Crawford have spent the past two years not just protesting, but also organizing, even running for office, to end the warmongers’ rule in Washington.

Democratic leaders, such as Representatives Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel and Senator Harry Reid, who voted for the funding bill, spin the vote as a strategic step on the path they hope will deliver them the White House in 2008. They must be counting on more peace activists “resigning” as Sheehan has, but there’s no indication that that’s the case.

In the days since the Iraq vote, the progressive blogs have been filled with talk of primary challenges to incumbent pro-war Democrats. The until-recently timid membership group MoveOn is currently running TV ads against Hoyer in his home district. The fact that nearly every Washington Democrat seeking the presidential nomination voted no (except Delaware Senator Joe Biden) suggests that at least some Democrats are getting the message.

Sheehan spoke for many when she voiced her rage at Democrats who talk peace and ok war. And that many are not retiring anytime soon.

Laura Flanders is the author of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians, out now from The Penguin Press.

[cenacle]

Our Loss
by David Michael Green

Published on Monday, June 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/04/1642/

Cindy Sheehan announced her departure from the American public sphere last week, and the loss of her voice touched me deeply.

I am saddened for her personally, for few have sacrificed so much for their country, with so little to show for it. She gave her son, Casey, for George Bush’s war in Iraq. Then she spent the next three years giving up her health, her marriage, the full-time parenting of her surviving children, and every ounce of her time and energy - all to prevent other mothers from suffering the same fate.

Arguably, she has nothing to show for her sacrifices other than the scorn of America’s rabid right, most of whom somehow never seem to show up themselves when there is fighting to be done abroad. That plus another hole in her heart, to match the one left by the waste of her son’s life.

To read Sheehan’s farewell letter is to realize that she now also mourns another death along with Casey’s, that of America as the country she and so many others of us grew up believing in.

Most Americans know of Sheehan from the stand she took outside Bush’s vacation ranch in Crawford, asking only that he meet with her. The sheer courage and simplicity of that act made for a compelling David versus Goliath story that few could not find inherently sympathetic.

Which is precisely why it drove conservative pundits ballistic, and why they launched their vitriolic personal attacks against her, just as they have with every other one of their critics or political adversaries. To observe the savaging of a mother who had given her son for this country, because she dared to ask inconvenient questions, was perhaps the greatest shame of all in an epoch of one astonishing political disgrace after another.

But that is precisely what happened. Fred Barnes said, “She’s a crackpot”. Michelle Malkin had the audacity to claim that Casey wouldn’t approve of “his mother’s crazy accusations”. And there were much, much worse, and far, far more personal attacks beyond these.

Not to mention hypocrisy. Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with three fundamental propositions about Iraq: that we were lied into the war, that we are failing there, and that Americans should be coming home. Today, Bill O’Reilly says “It was the wrong battlefield. It was. And there’s no getting around that. We made a mistake.”

Leaving aside the known fact, based in documentary evidence, that it was no “mistake” at all, this is the same O’Reilly who only a few years ago argued that Cindy Sheehan - then making essentially the same arguments he makes today - was “in bed with the radical left”, that “this kind of behavior borders on treasonous” and that she was linked to “people who hate this government, hate their country”.

Are you not now also a traitor then, Bill?

And what does it say of America that the president couldn’t meet with her, couldn’t address her questions, couldn’t risk exposure of his deceits, couldn’t argue the virtues of his own policy? And what does it say of Americans that we weren’t universally enraged at this? And that we weren’t universally disgusted at the visage of the most powerful man in the world cowering in his ranch home behind an army of Secret Service agents, desperately hiding from an ordinary American mother standing out in the sun holding a sign?

Actually, though many people don’t know it, Cindy Sheehan did meet with George W. Bush once.

Even more harrowing than the meeting they didn’t have, is the one they did. It came in the wake of Casey’s death, back when Sheehan was still on board with the administration’s propaganda program. That would soon change. To read Cindy’s description of that encounter between her family and George Bush is to come face to face with the numbing depth of his heartlessness.

Bush came bounding into the meeting, all full of frat-boy ebullience. An astonished Sheehan family watched as he glibly blurted, “So who are we honoring here?” and repeatedly referred to Cindy as “Mom”. As if that weren’t contemptuously disrespectful enough, Bush hadn’t bothered to learn Casey’s name. When the family tried to show him pictures of this fallen soldier - the very kind of person the president loves to refer to as a hero in the abstraction of countless photo-ops - he refused to look. Faced with the real grief of real people, he then demonstrated the same cut-and-run tactic for which he is so fond of excoriating others for using in trying to clean up his mess in Baghdad.

If this man has a heart, and if he cares about the damage he has wrought in the hearts of others, he surely hid it well that day.

But on this day - today - as the American disaster in Iraq descends into further chaos, as it lasts longer than our involvement in World War Two, and as even conservative scholars now refer to it as the worst foreign policy blunder in our long history, Mr. Bush’s war takes another bloody toll at home as well, ripping a gash in the fabric of our national soul.

For, while I like to think Cindy’s work will someday pay handsome dividends of revived sanity in America, in the short term what I see is that Casey is gone, Cindy is gone home, and George and Bill remain.

Maybe this was once the land of the free and the home of brave, perhaps way back in the olden times of the twentieth century. But right now the free are at home with their wide-screen TVs and the brave are retiring from the field, exhausted and disgusted.

If that isn’t the perfect formula for national decline, I don’t know what is.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.