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Yeah, peace is so boring. Why would anyone want peace?
The loss of this lady's son is tragic. When he signed up did he think there would never be any risk? I think not! Did he have a problem taking the pay? I think not! The mere fact that this lady is politicalizing her sons death is tragic for this country and a disgrace.
Yeah, peace is so boring. Why would anyone want peace?
What year was it her son was drafted ?
When asked to meet with her AGAIN George responded
Day 8: Camp Casey
-- a message from Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, TX
It is not often that Cindy Sheehan is at a loss for words. I will try and describe today, though. It was the most incredible, fantastic, fabulous, amazing, powerful, miraculous event I have ever been a part of. I was so humbled and honored at the outpouring of love and support that arrived in Camp Casey today.
It was a busy morning of interviews and problem solving. I had interviews with some network shows and a photo shoot for the Vanity Fair article. Almost all of the reporters ask me if I have accomplished anything at Camp Casey and I think we really have. We have brought the war onto the front pages of the newspapers and the top stories of the mainstream media. It is really incredible that we are doing so well in the media because I keep telling all of the reporters that I am doing their jobs. I am asking the tough questions of the President that they don’t ask.
We are also gathering people together in this country who believe that this war is a mistake and our troops should come home. I know people have been frustrated, either sitting on the fence or apathetically sitting on the sidelines. I know before Casey was killed, I didn’t think that one person could make a difference in the world. Now I know that isn’t true. Not only can one person make a difference, but one person, with millions behind her can make history. I really believe that this movement that began in Crawford, Texas (does the irony escape anyone) is going to grow and grow and transform the world. Like I said last night in my blog: hope is blossoming in Crawford, because WE have the power.
The CBS reporter whom I met last Saturday when I began this Holy War against the War of Terrorism that George Bush is waging on the world told me that he has interviewed me 4 times this week already. He told me that he has never, ever interviewed anyone 4 times, let alone four times in one week. I was joking with the reporters that were here last week that they should have brought me flowers on our one week anniversary.
The most fantabulistic (I needed a new word, none of the old ones fit) thing happened in Crawford today. There was a very insignificant counter-protest across the way. At first the Sheriffs let them stand in the street, until we politely pointed out to the Sheriffs that we had to stay in the ditch last week. So they made them move into the ditch. Since we are supposedly in Bush country, the counter protest was so small and weak. They had signs that said “Stay the Course.” I appreciated that. I really believe they were telling me to stay the course. I will.
We also met a man whose son was KIA in Iraq in November of 2004. He still loves George Bush and thinks we are doing great things in Iraq. By the end of the day we were drinking beer together and telling each other “I love you.” I am telling you miracles are happening here in Crawford.
Anyway, back to the fantabulistic thing that happened today. We had a rally downtown in Crawford. Then the people caravanned up to Camp Casey. I was told to come down to the point of the triangle to greet them. While I was walking down to the point, I had a great view of Prairie Chapel Road. There was car, after car, after car!!! I started sobbing and I felt like collapsing. The cars kept on coming. It took almost a full hour for them to all get to Camp Casey, it was a miraculous sight to see. It was identical to Field of Dreams.
People came from all over the country to be here. We are building a movement and they are coming.
We don’t have a full count of all the people who were there, but I would say hundreds. It was amazing and awesome. I felt the spirits of all of our needlessly killed loved ones in the presence of Camp Casey. I felt their strength and the wisdom of the ages with me in that wonderful place.
Today was George Bush’s accountability moment, and he lost. Two young ladies from San Diego drove all night to get to the rally and they had to leave tonight to get back home. One of them said: “Wow, we can drive all the way from San Diego just to meet you and he can’t even come down to the end of his driveway to meet with you.”
George Bush: you work for me. I pay your salary. Come out and talk to me. Anyway, I have a feeling you are about to be fired!!!
It's nice that they can all tune in, turn on, and drop out, having a good old party...while our boys are fighting for their lives over in Iraq. Those ing hippies disgust me...Stoned people should not be getting involved in politics.
I'm glad the two little valley girls enjoyed their trip...but some of us have to work for a living.
Cindy's Victory
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 15 August 2005
- Gen. Barry McCaffrey, after returning from an inspection of Iraq, 08/12/2005.This thing, the wheels are coming off it.
William River Pitts, TruthoutThey are sunburned and storm-lashed. They sleep in tents that sit along the muddy earth of drainage ditches by the side of the road. They have been heckled by "counter-demonstrators" who chanted "We don't care!" during a rendition of "God Bless America." They have been attacked by fire ants and hassled by local health inspectors. On Thursday morning, at about 5:30am, they were blasted awake by a fourteen-car convoy of Secret Service SUVs which roared through the camp at high speed while leaning on their horns the whole time.
They have been jolted with fear when a local resident fired his weapon into the air several times to make them go away. When the shooter, one Larry Mattlage, was asked why he was firing his gun, he said, "We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law. We're going to do whatever it takes." It is safe to say, therefore, that their lives have been threatened.
The thing is, they've already won.
Cindy Sheehan and her ever-growing band of supporters intend to stay in those ditches outside Bush's Crawford "ranch" until he comes out to talk or until August 31st, whichever comes first. If he does not come out by the end of the month, she intends to follow him to Washington and camp out in front of the White House. She and the others have been there for more than a week now, garnering more and more attention from the national and international press. Yes, they are tired. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they have already won.
The nearly 2,000 crosses, crescents and Stars of David that make up the Arlington West cemetery, erected by the demonstrators a few days ago to represent all the fallen American soldiers in Iraq, stretch almost a mile down the country road. Bush had to drive past that on Friday when he went to his fundraising shindig at the Broken Spoke Ranch. 54 crosses have been added to the cemetery since he first showed up for his vacation at the beginning of August. It takes a while to drive past them all. This man, who cannot abide hearing or seeing anything in the way of dissent or disagreement, saw those crosses whistle past his window. That is a victory.
For three years now, both before the invasion of Iraq began and then after it was unleashed, millions of people have marched and screamed and stomped in order to try to put a stop to this disaster. The Bush administration was not pushed off its tracks even an inch in all this time. Discussions and debates on why we are there and whether or not we should leave have been bunted aside.
Half a dozen reasons for the invasion and occupation have been put forth - weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda terrorism, the building of a democracy, Hussein was a bad man - but in the end, the debate is halted by the kind of brainless thinking that left us in Vietnam for far too long: "We are there, so we have to stay." This was the accepted wisdom.
Not anymore.
All the protests, all the articles, all the books, all the whistleblowers, all the criticism combined have not packed the kind of punch that one mother in a ditch has delivered to this administration's carefully crafted fantasy vision of what is happening in Iraq. Suddenly, Bush has been forced to go before cameras and try to explain why staying in Iraq is the only option available. Suddenly, the accepted wisdom isn't so accepted anymore. A majority of Americans, according to every available poll, agree with the lady in the ditch and not with the president.
Bush isn't doing a very good job of explaining his side of things, and his people seem unable to keep their stories straight. After the fourteen Marines from Ohio were killed in Iraq, Bush got up and stated that it would be unreasonable for him to lay down a timetable for withdrawal. Yet at the same time, his generals were bent over maps and logistics notebooks, trying to do exactly that.
The Los Angeles Times on Saturday took a look at the mixed messages coming from the war party. "Are the president and the Pentagon on the same page over the war in Iraq?" asked the Times. "That question is percolating in Washington after President Bush twice in the last 10 days tried to clarify a message sent by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military leaders. After Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials indicated their desire to shift away from discussing the struggle against terrorism as a 'war' - saying it placed too much emphasis on military solutions to terrorism - Bush repeatedly used the word 'war' in an Aug. 3 speech to conservative state legislators."
"Then," continued the Times article, "on Thursday, Bush dismissed as 'rumors' and 'speculation' reports that U.S. commanders were contemplating significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq next year. His comments came after Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, and Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander, had publicly raised exactly that possibility."
Hmm.
On Sunday, out of nowhere, the Washington Post published a page-one story led "US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq." The story stated, "The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months. The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges."
The article goes on to describe how any "democracy" will have to bend itself around the laws of Islam, a fact that chucks the secular-government talking points into the round file. Iraqi women, should not get their hopes up about being granted significant rights of any kind. The kicker came in the third paragraph, which quotes an unnamed US official saying, "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
In other words, the whole thing was a Charlie Foxtrot from soup to nuts. There are no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists connected to 9/11 were not there (though there are plenty there now learning how best to kill Americans with bombs), and democracy is not to be found anywhere on the menu. The hearts and flowers we were promised have not come, and are not coming. Sure, Hussein is still a bad man, but that rationale for this war is an outright laugher when compared to the cost of getting rid of him. Though Bush clings desperately to his canned lines to defend his actions, the facts speak for themselves. This whole bloody enterprise has been a colossal, expensive, murderous failure.
The funny part is that Bush almost certainly could have maintained the public fantasy with one simple act. He could have jumped into his pickup truck last Saturday, when Cindy Sheehan was alone except for her sister in that ditch, and driven down to see her. He could have invited her into the shotgun seat and driven her around the neighborhood for a few minutes. He could have then gone back up to the "ranch" and told the press corps that he met with her, and that they had looked into each other's hearts. That would have been the end of it.
He did not do that. Now, his generals are at loggerheads with the public line coming from the White House about getting out of Iraq. Unnamed officials are going on the record to state that the whole plan was hare-brained from the word "go," and that the entire deal sits now in the ashes of its own utterly ruined failure. Bush has to keep explaining why we have to stay, why rearranging the deck chairs on this anic is a noble and worthwhile process. Meanwhile, the whole world mocks him for hiding from one woman and her broken heart.
Cindy Sheehan has done this with one act of conscience. She has managed to do what no other protest or action or statement has been able to do. She has knocked the wheels right off this absurd applecart. She has called the man to account. She can hang her own "Mission Accomplished" banner above her tent in that ditch. She has already won.
Her son would be very, very proud.
Last edited by Nbadan; 08-15-2005 at 02:53 AM.
Thank You.This just in...US military service is voluntary.
IF you are not willing to die for your country...then don't join the military.
IF you do not want your son or daughter to die in service to their country...then don't let them join the military.
If you join the military...there is always a very strong chance that you will be called into service and sent into a war.
It's not just something you sign up for to do a lot of exersize and wear silly looking clothes.
Why do you post propaganda Dan?
Yes, the military is voluntary, but service members don't get to choose what battle they want to participate in when they chose to defend their country. They rely on the promise of politicians that they will not be asked to make the greatest sacrifice unless the freedom, liberty and sovereignty of the U.S, is threatened. Yesterday the Bush administration admitted that true democracy is probably unattainable in Iraq, dropping the latest facade by our government linking our justification for remaining in Iraq. So if Democracy isn't a sure thing, and we are going to leave Iraq in another year regardless of the insurgency situation, why are we still there?This just in...US military service is voluntary.
IF you are not willing to die for your country...then don't join the military.
IF you do not want your son or daughter to die in service to their country...then don't let them join the military.
If you join the military...there is always a very strong chance that you will be called into service and sent into a war.
It's not just something you sign up for to do a lot of exersize and wear silly looking clothes.
Why do you post propaganda Dan?
If you think I am the one posting propaganda then let’s compare over the last year how many times I have posted about the deteriorating situation in Iraq, about the lack of WMD and association with anything named Al-Queda by Saddam. Let's compare how many times I have been wrong about anything, and successfully challenged by anyone who has backed up their argument with verifiable facts.
It's very easy to call information propaganda, any monkey on a keyboard can do that, but proving something is propaganda requires diligence and intelligence – two skills I can tell neither of you possess.
You can't appease terrorists and Cindy Sheehan's conduct is very terroristlike...she thinks she speaks for the entire US and, is trying to dictate policy...
She doesn't speak for me.
And her poor mother act would play better if she wasn't allied with a bunch of Left Wingers...she's representative of a hostile political movement that's trying to impose it's minority view on the American people, and I don't blame Bush for not speaking with her...especially since he has already done so.
Her son dying does not put the elected leader of this country at her beckon call...
And who the does she think she is fooling with her, "I just want to know the truth" BS?
She wants to hear what she wants to hear...not the truth.
The greatest sacrafice any mother can make for her country is her children. Cindy Sheehan has made that sacrafice. You should be thankful that there are mothers like Sheehan who will fight to keep the memories of our troops who have died and will continue to die in Iraq fresh in the mind of Americans who think that putting a yellow support our troops on their SUV is a war sacrafice.You can't appease terrorists and Cindy Sheehan's conduct is very terroristlike...she thinks she speaks for the entire US and, is trying to dictate policy...
She doesn't speak for me.
And her poor mother act would play better if she wasn't allied with a bunch of Left Wingers...she's representative of a hostile political movement that's trying to impose it's minority view on the American people, and I don't blame Bush for not speaking with her...especially since he has already done so.
Her son dying does not put the elected leader of this country at her beckon call...
No, Whott, Cindy Sheehan is not the person who should be hanging her head in shame over her recent conduct- you should be.
Cindy Sheehan didn't make that sacrifice, her son did. She doesn't get credit for dying in service to this country...and her comments clearly show why she doesn't...
Her son gets the credit...he's the hero. Not her.
What are her comments Whott? Cindy simply wants to know the real reason why her son had to die in Iraq. If it wasn't the WMD's, or terrorists links, or founding democracy in the Middle East, then what was it? That question is a hidden mindfield for the President because no matter which way he goes he could step in some deep do-do, especially now that this story has gained national attention.
Remember, I was in the camp that said that W should have nipped this circus in the bud, but that ship has sailed.
Adios Mofo!
Excuse me while I pick myself off the floor.They rely on the promise of politicians that they will not be asked to make the greatest sacrifice unless the freedom, liberty and sovereignty of the U.S, is threatened.
That's some pretty funny ...if you believe it!!!!!!!!!!!
Isn't "Promise of politicians" and oxymoron?
How do you feel about Cindy Sheehan's protest in Crawford?
I admire her
8.4%
I disagree with her
9.2%
She speaks for many who oppose the war
30.7%
She is disrespecting her son and other soldiers
46.4%
I don't know
5.4%
That poll could have included an "All of the Above" option.
btw, it was mysa.com
this lady is hilarious now, I hear now she wants the israeli's out of palestine and isn't not going to pay her taxes.... hmmmmm well I guess know she wants to be US ambassador to the UN and break federal law... I hope the IRS is heard her... she'd be keeping some waiting on a welfare check, from getting there's.. yeah all you lefties don't disagree with this war... stop paying your taxes... defeat your ownself in the realm of social handouts.... it's too funny...
sheesh I need to stop thinking so fast... bah
this lady is hilarious now, I hear now she wants the israeli's out of palestine and isn't not going to pay her taxes.... hmmmmm well I guess now she wants to be US ambassador to the UN and break federal law... I hope the IRS has heard her... she'd be keeping someone waiting on a welfare check, from getting there's.. yeah all you lefties disagree with this war... stop paying your taxes... defeat your ownself in the realm of social handouts.... it's too funny...
What exactly is she going to do when Bush is done with vacation and leaves Crawford, call it a moral victory?
Um...the ones where she calls Bush a murderer and says she wants him impeached...Yeah right...she just wants to talk to the President to get the truth...and once he says he's telling her the truth she'll go home peacefully....
Who do you guys think you are kidding?
Because he joined the military and in doing so forfeited his right to not fight in a war.Cindy simply wants to know the real reason why her son had to die in Iraq.
It was for all of those reasons.If it wasn't the WMD's, or terrorists links, or founding democracy in the Middle East, then what was it? That question is a hidden mindfield for the President because no matter which way he goes he could step in some deep do-do, especially now that this story has gained national attention.
Remember, I was in the camp that said that W should have nipped this circus in the bud, but that ship has sailed.
Adios Mofo!
Yeap...keep having Michael Moore take center stage for your party...
You guys will be looking up at the communist party in election returns by the time it's all over....
Doesn't it kind of bother you that the leader of your party is a loser and is always wrong?
He needs to take his death exploitation money, go buy and Island, and then hate himself to death...instead of trying to drag us with him. What a fat disgusting .
Nope, she intends to follow him to Washington.
Ummm...I think it's the Republicans that should be worried. Paul Hackett helped prove in Ohio that a strong-on-war Democratic candidate can win even in a Republican strong-hold given the right time and finances. It made even Newt Gingrich and other Republicans admit that Conservatives need to wake up and take notice before the 06 mid-term elections. Republicans have also taken a beating lately in Texas over the lack of school finance reform.Yeap...keep having Michael Moore taking center stage for your party...
You guys will be looking up at the communist party in election returnts by the time it's all over....
Doesn't it kind of bother you that the leader of your party is a loser and is always wrong?
Don't let Hackett go to your head.....even I was considering the guy a good candidate...he had unimpeachable credentials in a fiercely patriotic sector of the country, and still lost to an absolute hag of a candidate. Their major difference? She had a clearly defined patriotic stance and he didn't. He lost.
All this spending won't end well for her come tax time.
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