Cindy Sheehan is right.

I support Cindy Sheehan’s decision to resign from the Democratic Party. How long can we afford to interpret benign intent in actions that support the funding of this war? Once again, she is showing true courage.

In her own words:

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?

5 Comments

boran2 on May 30, 2007 at 3:13 pm

It is getting harder to distinguish between the 2 parties. They all feed from the same coporate troughs and support the same war.

supersoling on May 31, 2007 at 2:00 am

Cindy Sheehan is more than right, of course.
Her problem is that she communicates an accurate assessment of the state of our monolithic and pyramid scheme political culture, our racially and economically biased morality, and a warped set of priorites that worships material wealth, the pursuit of if, protection of it. It’s an endeavor that supplants any lingering memories of what American citizens once did when they were threatened or bullied by their government and forced to fight and die in bullshit wars. And yet we’re entangled in a near catastrophic bullshit war right now. In many ways recognizably much worse in it’s implications for our future than Vietnam, and people sit…

…and along comes someone asking a very simple and straightforward question, ‘for what noble cause‘? Then she sarted asking the really inconvenient questions of the democrats and, you know….she upset the balance by being…balanced!

I’ll tell you what though. She’s not as rare a commodity as the media and it’s employers would like to mindfuck us into believing. And if the democrats and those who still support them think that it’ll be business as usual again, and ignore the fact that this time lots of people are reaching their WTF!!? quota and genuinely searching for alternatives, I gotta saysorry, but…, Cindy Sheehan just shined a bright light on their complacency and partnership in this war and it’s disasters. We noticed and we’re demanding that they do the work they were elected to do. If I have a guy working for me and I’m paying him good money and he turns around and tells me to go fuck myself…I’m not too inclined to continue funding him. Know what I mean? As far as I’m concerned the thin thread that held my last shred of a benefit of a doubt for them is broken, and I’m firing them. They’re fired. They don’t work for me anymore. They don’t work for you…they don’t work for our soldiers…and not even the deaths of over half a million Iraqi’s, nearly all civilians, is enough to jar their consciences into action.

So, I’m with Cindy, and Steven D here. Stop funding them until, if ever, they get off their soft, lazy asses and make an honest fight of it. Money talks…bullshit walks.

Cindy Sheehan deserves a break and a rest. And I hope she finds some peace and healing to ease her pain because she fuckin earned, and in the process touched a lot of hearts and inspired a dormant passion for engagement and honest dissent.

Peace

on May 31, 2007 at 8:01 am

Cindy quits and the reaction is just about a flatline.
We generated far more “activism” during ABC’s airing of that 911 “documentary”.

duranta on May 31, 2007 at 9:24 am

It’s not a flatline though, among the people that really care that this war is ended sooner, rather than later. That’s what really matters. That we continue to debate our strategy to end this war, and her “resignation” is prompting more debate and soul searching, as it should.

on May 31, 2007 at 4:07 pm

There is a good piece on this today in Counterpunch: Appropriate Disillusionment

“I am deemed a radical,” writes Sheehan, “because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside” Having seen Sheehan speak on several occasions, I think rather she’s been deemed radical because her understanding of the war is too honest for the system’s hacks and political opportunists (including some who affect a liberal antiwar posture) to endorse. They cannot.

Nancy Pelosi cannot say, “This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law.” Harry Reid can’t say, “The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.”

That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the “loyal opposition.” Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn’t work for. In the early ’70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We’re not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself—the money-driven “Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics”—is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

boran2 on May 30, 2007 at 3:13 pm

It is getting harder to distinguish between the 2 parties. They all feed from the same coporate troughs and support the same war.
supersoling on May 31, 2007 at 2:00 am

Cindy Sheehan is more than right, of course.
Her problem is that she communicates an accurate assessment of the state of our monolithic and pyramid scheme political culture, our racially and economically biased morality, and a warped set of priorites that worships material wealth, the pursuit of if, protection of it. It’s an endeavor that supplants any lingering memories of what American citizens once did when they were threatened or bullied by their government and forced to fight and die in bullshit wars. And yet we’re entangled in a near catastrophic bullshit war right now. In many ways recognizably much worse in it’s implications for our future than Vietnam, and people sit…

…and along comes someone asking a very simple and straightforward question, ‘for what noble cause‘? Then she sarted asking the really inconvenient questions of the democrats and, you know….she upset the balance by being…balanced!

I’ll tell you what though. She’s not as rare a commodity as the media and it’s employers would like to mindfuck us into believing. And if the democrats and those who still support them think that it’ll be business as usual again, and ignore the fact that this time lots of people are reaching their WTF!!? quota and genuinely searching for alternatives, I gotta saysorry, but…, Cindy Sheehan just shined a bright light on their complacency and partnership in this war and it’s disasters. We noticed and we’re demanding that they do the work they were elected to do. If I have a guy working for me and I’m paying him good money and he turns around and tells me to go fuck myself…I’m not too inclined to continue funding him. Know what I mean? As far as I’m concerned the thin thread that held my last shred of a benefit of a doubt for them is broken, and I’m firing them. They’re fired. They don’t work for me anymore. They don’t work for you…they don’t work for our soldiers…and not even the deaths of over half a million Iraqi’s, nearly all civilians, is enough to jar their consciences into action.

So, I’m with Cindy, and Steven D here. Stop funding them until, if ever, they get off their soft, lazy asses and make an honest fight of it. Money talks…bullshit walks.

Cindy Sheehan deserves a break and a rest. And I hope she finds some peace and healing to ease her pain because she fuckin earned, and in the process touched a lot of hearts and inspired a dormant passion for engagement and honest dissent.

Peace
on May 31, 2007 at 8:01 am

Cindy quits and the reaction is just about a flatline.
We generated far more “activism” during ABC’s airing of that 911 “documentary”.
- duranta on May 31, 2007 at 9:24 am
  
  It’s not a flatline though, among the people that really care that this war is ended sooner, rather than later. That’s what really matters. That we continue to debate our strategy to end this war, and her “resignation” is prompting more debate and soul searching, as it should.
on May 31, 2007 at 4:07 pm

There is a good piece on this today in Counterpunch: Appropriate Disillusionment

“I am deemed a radical,” writes Sheehan, “because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside” Having seen Sheehan speak on several occasions, I think rather she’s been deemed radical because her understanding of the war is too honest for the system’s hacks and political opportunists (including some who affect a liberal antiwar posture) to endorse. They cannot.

Nancy Pelosi cannot say, “This is an imperialist war to reconfigure the Middle East, allow the U.S. to control the flow of oil from the region, dot it with huge permanent U.S. military bases, advance Israeli aims in the region, and intimidate all potential rivals for decades. It is wrong, a clear violation of international law.” Harry Reid can’t say, “The lies of these war planners are so obvious. We need hearings now about the Office of Special Plans. We need to find out who forged the Niger uranium documents and who undercut our intelligence professionals in pushing that completely false case presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. We need to move on impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.”

That sort of honest talk is not normally allowed by the system to the “loyal opposition.” Only under circumstances of extraordinary duress, when it feels its very existence threatened, does the system make some concessions to the people it doesn’t work for. In the early ’70s our outrage over the war in Vietnam, compounded by disgust about the evolving Watergate Affair, forced Congress to cut off war funding (through the Case-Church Amendment passed on June 19, 1973), produced a wave of investigations that exposed the vicious Cointelpro Program, and produced the Freedom of Information Act. We’re not yet back to that level of outrage, but the number of people questioning the system itself—the money-driven “Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics”—is growing. As the Democrats drag their feet, ignore their mandate to end the war, and collude with moves against Iran and Syria bound to produce disastrous repercussions, disillusionment will no doubt mount, as it should.

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