All along I have written and believed that Cindy Sheehan was a useful idiot for the left, a sympathetic morally untouchable figurehead for the anti war anti Bush left.

And Like Watada, their latest useful idiot, as soon as her effectiveness and usefulness is gone, they will turn away.

Cindy finally got that message.  This is her message on Daily Kos.

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.

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?

Or maybe she didn't get it.  This is not about gender, or about her place in society as a woman, and she demeans her own argument by trying to imply it is.

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."

And I give her grudging credit for being consistent.  She opposed the war and anyone who supported it, and unlike so many did not stoop to political expedience.

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.

I think she waxes delusional here, as the support for the war in both parties is slipping, as well as her hundreds of thousands claim.

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.

God.  I actually agree with that.

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.

Oh the pundits are going to latch onto that line....

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.

My initial instinct is to say about time.  It may not be fair to her to demean her thus, but her other children need their mom more then the anti war movement needs Mother Sheehan.

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.

 She is not going to disappear, but maybe she has come to the realization that her belief and movement has been coopted by politics, something so many of us have noted.

In the end, this is sad.  While many of the left and right will jeer, I feel nothing but pity for her, as she becomes the face of a new cause:  the broken face of a person used up and spit out by a dishonest political machine.  She has been used like a cheap date, and now is discarded because she was true to her beliefs. 

All her work and all her passion, no matter how misguided, has been for nothing.  It is not a happy thing to realize/

Look, I am not her apologist, and I disagree with her in the strongest terms about most if not all of what she says about the war, but I have to concede, as I did above, that in her beliefs, her rhetoric and her sensationalism she was completely consistent to all comers.  She demanded to see Bush, but also Hillary.  She was really one of the few "honest" anti war people, in that she was 100% anti war, no ifs ands or buts. 

She is still divorced from reality on many points, and this shocking realization will not make her any more rational about the war.  She and I will likely never see eye to eye.

But she now understands how much of the anti war rhetoric is just politically expedient nonsense and it is about time she sees for herself what so many have complained about for so long.

She has finally gotten a huge dose of reality when faced with this truism:

When you allow yourself to be a useful idiot to the democrats, as soon as you are no longer useful, you are just another idiot to them.

  Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson's Website, Mark My Words, Right Truth, Big Dog's Weblog, Shadowscope, DragonLady's World, The Amboy Times, Here's looking at . . . me!, Pursuing Holiness, , The HILL Chronicles, third world county, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, Stageleft, , stikNstein... has no mercy, The Right Nation, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Committees of Correspondence, A Blog For All, DeMediacratic Nation, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, On the Horizon, the so called me, , Webloggin, The Bullwinkle Blog, Phastidio.net, Cao's Blog, Colloquium, , Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Blue Collar Muse, Allie Is Wired, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, CORSARI D'ITALIA, High Desert Wanderer, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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