essaysfromtheedge

Good Riddance, Indeed

Good Riddance Attention Whore

This is the title of Mama Sheehan's "resignation Letter," posted on the DailyKos on May 28, 2007. You can read the whole, pathetic thing here, if you have the stomach for it.



I want to touch on a couple salient points.

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?

Cindy accidentally hits the nail on the head here. The Left in America saw here as a propaganda piece they could use against Bush. Cindy, who was certainly dealing with genuine grief over the loss of her son, was not smart enough to pick up on this. She was being used, but as long as she could continue on her "crusade," she ignored the manipulation and plummeted boldly forward.

Once she turned her venom on the Left, particularly after they didn't fall into lockstep with the anti-war movement upon their ascendancy to power in Congress, she was no doubt told in no uncertain terms that she had crossed the line; she was biting the hand that had fed her. Her naivety didn't allow her to see that hand until she felt the slap that invariably followed.

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.

Now, isn't this an interesting statement, particularly in light of Cindy's support of true fascists like Hugo Chavez?



The key phrase here is "corporate fascist." Make no mistake, Cindy does not like America (more on that in a minute), and she sees our capitalist system as immoral. Thus the coupling of "corporate" and "fascist."

It also belies her ignorance of true fascism. Cindy is merely vilified by those Americans who disagree with her. In a truly fascist country, she would be dead. One look at her buddy Chavez's takeover of the Venezuelan broadcasting industry is evidence enough of the behavior of a true fascist regime.

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.

Casey did not die for nothing - he, more than anyone, understood his sacrifice, and the freedoms the Iraqi people are now experiencing are worth the price he paid. A few blogs back I compared Cindy's "grief" to the appreciation of an Iraqi woman, her finger purple from her first experience voting in free elections. That's what the sacrifice was for, and recent comments from Casey's troop mates make it clear he understood this.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life.

I wonder if her experience with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton taught her this? Two more self-aggrandizing people cannot be found on the face of the planet.

This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement.

[snip]

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.

Now we reach the core issue - Cindy does not love America. Of course, her admission trails our own realization of this truth.



Cindy wants us to believe that she is not an "attention whore." One would be hard pressed to buy this in light of the facts.





A good treatment of Cindy's departure can be found here and here. Keep in mind when you read these that they are both written by people who agree with Cindy's anti-war position. They just don't like her whiny "me-at-all-costs" tactics.

My personal feeling is that Cindy was forced out by her handlers - by those very same people whose hand she bit after November, 2006. Cindy will never admit this (she may not realize it), and her letter is more a propaganda piece to keep alive her image as the grieving mom, but it's clear that she is no longer useful as an encumbrance to Bush to anyone on the left.

And this should be the lesson to anyone who wishes to align themselves with Liberals on purely ideological grounds: in the end, it's not really about ideology, it's about power. When your ideology gets in the way of the Left's unquenchable thirst for power, you are worse than expendable.

You're an "Attention Whore."




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posted by Tomás @ 5/31/2007 10:10:00 AM