Saturday - August 13, 2005

Open Discussion: Cindy Sheehan

I have a great deal of trouble believing Cindy Sheehan’s motives. I sympathize with her for the loss of her son, who from all reports, did his job quietly and was a model soldier. It is a terrible loss when any of our troops dies on the field of battle. I grieve with her and I wish her son hadn’t died. War is a terrible thing but when war is brought upon a nation by outsiders what can that nation do? Surrender and accept defeat or take the fight to the enemy to stop them from any further attacks? It is a difficult decision and I believe President Bush made the right decision. I don’t want to live in a country ruled by fear of further terrorist attacks or subjugated to a Muslim rule.

Would I sacrifice one of my sons to stop the terrorists and help bring peace to the Middle East? That is a tough question that would best be answered by my sons for it would be their decision, not mine, to go fight. Once they made that decision, I would have to stand by them, pray for them and support them. If they died in combat, I would be devastated, no doubt about that. There is no way I could bring them back. I know that too. However, with that said, I could not place myself in the position this woman has. I would have to continue to support the President’s decision and the other troops engaged in this war. Otherwise, I would have to admit that my son died in vain and whose life had been useless. I couldn’t do that. To do so would dishonor him and his decision. That just isn’t right.

Cindy Sheehan obviously feels differently. The liberal Washington Post calls it “Cindy Sheehan’s Pitched Battle”, as if she is a warrior on a battlefield. She is, but she is on the wrong side. She is being used by every Leftist group in the country. She may not know it but she is also being used by the terrorists, much as Jane Fonda was used by the North Vietnamese. She provides encouragement to the enemy and guarantees that other mothers will lose their sons .... more than would be lost if she would just sit down and shut up.

(WASHINGTON POST)—CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 12—Cindy Sheehan vaulted into national consciousness this month on the power of her story as the grieving mother of a fallen soldier.

But what began as a solitary campaign to force a meeting with President Bush by setting up camp along the road to his ranch has quickly taken on the full trappings of a political campaign. Sheehan is working with a political consultant and a team of public relations professionals, and now she is featured in a television ad.

Sheehan began her protest here last Saturday after crisscrossing the country for more than a year demanding answers on why Bush continues to wage what she calls an unjust war in Iraq. After her son Casey Sheehan, 24, was killed in Baghdad last year, she founded Gold Star Families for Peace, an antiwar organization that labored largely in obscurity—until now.

In part, Sheehan’s case has echoed as her grievances merged with what polls show is growing dissatisfaction with the war. But her cause has also been aided by political organizers who swiftly mobilized around her—recognizing an opportunity to cause acute discomfort for a vacationing president and put a powerful emotional frame around the antiwar movement. No one watching cable television news this week, dominated by coverage of Sheehan’s crusade, could doubt that they largely achieved their aim.

Sheehan’s Crawford encampment has swollen in the past week, as other antiwar protesters have flocked to Texas. Members of CodePink, a women’s antiwar organization, have pitched their tent near Sheehan’s. TrueMajority—an antiwar group founded by Ben Cohen, one of the creators of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream—hired Fenton Communications, a Washington public relations firm that has worked intermittently with Sheehan over the past year to coordinate media coverage.

With this help, Sheehan has courted coverage from the traveling White House press corps with a news conference. A schedule of when relatives of other military casualties in Iraq are expected to join Sheehan here was distributed to reporters. Her team is coordinating an antiwar rally planned for Saturday.

Joe Trippi, the political consultant behind former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s early success in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary race, hosted a conference with Sheehan for liberal Internet bloggers, hoping their online dispatches will draw even wider attention. On Saturday, Sheehan launched a TV ad campaign hoping to achieve what her roadside vigil so far has not: a second chance to directly tell Bush about the devastation she has experienced since her son’s death.

Though Sheehan’s protest has galvanized support among antiwar activists, it has divided parts of her own family, some of whom sent an e-mail to news organizations distancing themselves from her protest.

“We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son’s good name and reputation,” said an e-mail sent to the Reporter newspaper, in Vacaville. The e-mail was signed by Casey Sheehan’s aunt Cherie Quartarolo on behalf of his paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

“The Sheehan family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq War and we have been silently, respectfully grieving,” the e-mail said. “The rest of the Sheehan family supports the troops, our country and our president, silently, with prayer and respect.”

Sheehan, however, told the paper that the admonition came from in-laws who often disagreed with her. “We have always been on separate sides of the fence politically and I have not spoken to them since the elections when they supported the man who is responsible for Casey’s death,” Sheehan said. “The thing that matters to me is that my family, Casey’s dad and my other three kids, are on the same side of the fence that I am.”

More On This Topic In Our Forums

Posted by The Skipper     on 08/13/2005 at 12:02 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
• Comments (10) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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