Sheehan leaves politics (she says)

In a piece entitled “Good Riddance Attention Whore” (at DailyKos), Cindy Sheehan claims to be leaving the political stage and retiring to her villa in the south of France (OK, I made that last part up, but…), in some ways I feel for her…no, really. I’m not just saying that. Here, let her tell you why I said that;

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.”

She found out that this nation’s Left can turn on it’s own people faster than a mongoose – something most of us have known all along. But, the Left, in the personage of Maureen Dowd, gave her “absolute moral authority”;

But [President Bush’s] humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.

But that absolute part was less absolute than Ms. Sheehan realized. She learned that the American Left, despite the fact that they claim otherwise, really don’t care about the troops or the troops’ parents – only to the extent that they can use it against Republicans and the current administration.

Sheehan fell for it, and even in this piece, she chastizes the Republicans for calling her a “”tool” of the Democrats”. Probably the most painful thing for her, is realizing that Republicans were correct. Of course she’ll never admit that we were right, but I think she knows it.

But some of us understand how she feels at this point, some of us who’ve been Democrats and dreamily drifted towards the Democrats’ siren song, were also awoken to the reality that the Democrats are all about politics and votes – nothing more. There’s nothing altruistic about being a Democrat – you can convince yourself that it’s compassionate, but only to the extent that it keeps Democrat politicians in their positions.

Look at what they did to Joe Lieberman. Did you really expect them to be different to you, Cindy? In fact, Lieberman threw the pro-Life crowd under the bus so he could be the Democrats VP candidate, and they still dumped him for disagreeing with them ON ONE SINGLE ISSUE.

But then she loses all of my sympathy in her last line;

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.

Um, Cindy, baby, we were around two-hundred or so years before you, I think we’ll make it through the rest without you. With or without your advice. And drop the anti-American crap, it doesn’t play well in Peoria.

Maybe you should go to Venezuela and hang out with your buddy Chavez, I hear they’re having a big party in the street this week.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Media, Politics