Say Goodbye To Mrs. Sheehan

FORT WORTH, Texas - Cindy Sheehan, the soldier's mother who galvanized an anti-war movement with her monthlong protest outside
President Bush's ranch, said Tuesday she's done being the public face of the movement.

"I've been wondering why I'm killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved in to
George Bush," Sheehan told The Associated Press while driving from her property in Crawford to the airport, where she planned to return to her native California.

"I'm going home for awhile to try and be normal," she said.

In what she described as a "resignation letter," Sheehan wrote in her online diary on the Daily Kos blog: "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."

Sheehan began a grass roots peace movement in August 2005 when she camped outside Bush's Crawford ranch for 26 days, demanding to talk with the president about her son's death. Army Spc. Casey Sheehan was 24 when he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad in 2004.

Cindy Sheehan's protest started small but swelled to thousands and quickly drew national attention. Over the next two years, she drew huge crowds as she spoke at protest events. But she also drew criticism for some actions, such as meeting with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president.

"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," Sheehan wrote in the diary.

Kristinn Taylor, spokesman for FreeRepublic.com, which has held pro-troop rallies and counter-protests of anti-war demonstrations, said dwindling crowds at Sheehan's Crawford protests since her initial vigil may have led to her decision. But he also said he hopes she will now be able to heal.

"Her politics have hurt a lot of people, including the troops and their families, but most of us who support the war on terror understand she is hurt very deeply," Taylor said Tuesday. "Those she got involved with in the anti-war movement realize it was to their benefit to keep her in that stage of anger."

When Sheehan first took on Bush, she was a darling of the liberal left. "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," she wrote in the diary.

She said she sacrificed a 29-year marriage and endured threats to put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement "that often puts personal egos above peace and human life."

She said the most devastating conclusion she had reached "was that Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think."

Sheehan told the AP that she had considered leaving the peace movement since last summer while recovering from surgery.

She decided on Memorial Day to step down and spend more time with her three other children. She said she was returning to California on Tuesday because it was Casey's birthday. He would have been 28.

"We've accomplished as much here as we're going to," Sheehan said, saying she was leaving to change course. "When we come back, it definitely won't be with the peace movement with marches, with rallies and with protests. It will be more humanitarian efforts."

Last year, with $52,500 in insurance money she received after her son's death, Sheehan bought 5 acres near downtown Crawford as a permanent site for protests.

"Camp Casey has served its purpose," she wrote in the diary. "It's for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas?"

 

So long, b*tch.

 

I'm only loosely aware of what this lady was about. I know she riled up some right wingers with her opposition to Bush's war. I'm curious. How was she a b*tch?

 

She is probably the most self-center, self-serving individual I have ever seen. She dishonored the name of her son and all he died for her own selfish gains.

 

You answered your own question.

 

Haha, "Bushes War", haha.
I guess you forgot that both the house and the senate voted for that authorization. That means hundreds of elected legislators, not just Bush.
Perhaps next year one of your high school teachers will actually teach you some civics instead of just propaganda.

 

PROPOGANDA????? look who's talking.

the Congress reacted to the information that was given to them. And numerous people have come out to say that it was bogus info. INcluding the director of the CIA at the time.

 

Here is Hillary Clinton's propaganda,

From her own website.
http://clinton.senate.gov/speeches/iraq_101002.html

 

She was reacting to the same intel that everyone else was given by the white house.

Her only crime is that she actually trusted the Bush administration.

 

No, she also trusted her husband, the former President, and her own experience in the whitehouse. I guess you missed that part, or chose to ignore that which doesn't fit in your little box. Here, let me re-post it for you.

Please try to be intellectually honest with yourself, it makes life easier.

 

Things change. Saddam was a threat when Clinton was President, but Clinton without invading, made him not a threat anymore.

If only the Bush Admin, would have let everyone else know the reality of the situation.

If only you would be intellectually honest enough to admit the fact that the Bush administration basically lied about the threat Saddam posed...

 

High school? I left high school, hitchhiked up north to protest the Vietnam War to give up a perspective on my age. And as far as this Hillary/Bill chidishness, I'm not a fan of either. But Mr. Clinton didn't invade Iraq on bogus, concocted evidence.

And now that Congress has requested we withdraw, what's stopping that? We can split hairs all night long and argue nomeclature, but meanwhile more younger people are dying over there. My daughter's husband and grandchildren's father, who happens to be about twelve years her junior, is stationed over there.

This isn't some gotcha on some banal Fox or MDNBC chattering propaganda show. This is real blood and guts life. I don't understand why all you believers in "Bush's War" haven't volunteered to go over there and help. Talk is cheap.

 

Well f*cking said!

 

Let's keep things in perspective. Hillary Clinton is 1 senator out of 100, and technically has 1/2 of 1/3 of 1% power that the president has. To say that she also voted for the war as a form of justification is a distortion of the facts.

 

I have served in Iraq AND Afghanistan,along with being in Desert Storm.
I was wounded in Iraq.
I believe in what we are doing in Iraq.

Do you have any more stupid statements about going to Iraq?