Cindy Sheehan's Opus

"Good Riddance Attention Whore"
by CindySheehan
Mon May 28, 2007 at 09:57:01 AM PDT

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.

* CindySheehan's diary :: ::

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?

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."

It's completely coincidence that she decided to do this on Memorial Day, right?

Right?

We have had several lively Cindy Sheehan threads here on the BP. It's been a while so I think I have gained some perspective on it.

Of course, my biggest problem with Sheehan is the attention whore thing. Her son was killed in Iraq and she used it as an opportunity to stroke her own ego and go on an expense account for a while. She is without any human worth, as far as I am concerned.

From a more objective point of view, though, my problem with her is that she trivializes the whole issue of the war. It is obvious to the most casual observer that her ego is paramount in the entire, sad mess. As well, she abused her position at the center of the media's attention by spouting off all sorts of leftist agit-prop, from feminism to socialism. She is one of the major reasons that anti-war sentiment was associated with the extreme left. Thanks a lot, numbskull. Ordinary Americans quit listening to reasonable anti-war arguments simply because nutcase attention whores like Sheehan declared themselves to be the "face of the anti-war movement." Indeed, just the invocation of a "movement" around anti-war sentiment dredges up memories of the worst of the shrill but trite diatribes by elitist liberals of the late Sixties.

For those of us who oppose the Bush Administration's adventurism abroad, the simple-minded sloganeering and Sunday School sentiments of visualizing world peace and mean people sucking are ideological vampires draining the life out of the rational arguments in support of freedom and liberty. They are the debutante throwing a snit because...well just because. They are empty and mindless and relegate every other attempt at reasonable discussion to the jingoist rubbish pile.