Personal Message From Vacaville

What follows are posts from FReeper Mom of Two Soldiers, a Vacaville resident who has quite a bit of background knowledge of events of the last few years vis-a-vis the Sheehan's and Vacaville's response to 9/11.

We were present at the Vacaville caravan two days ago. From the articles in the Associated Press and in the San Francisco Chronicle, one would have thought there were two different functions.

Anxiously, while the group waited for arrival, there were two families present who were somber and anxious. One from Vallejo and one from Vacaville.

The Vallejo family was the brother of a solider hwo had fallen in Iraq. The Vacaville family was a father of a fallen Marine. On March 23, 2003, Marine Lance Cpl. Michael J. Williams, 31, was killed in action during a firefight around Nasiriyah, Iraq. The Yuma, Ariz., native was reported missing in action March 26 before the military changed his status three days later to killed in action. He was based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., and assigned to the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. He was engaged to be married and proposed while on a ship in Kuwait, prior to going into battle.

One could tell that the mention of Sheehan brought up emotions for the family members. Hands visibly shook as the father, Joseph Wilson, put a photograph of his son and a folded flag in front of it, upon the hood of his truck.

Hugs of support were given to him and to one another from members of the group, mostly families of soldiers, former soldiers and those who have been personally touched by the War in Iraq.

By those who were in the same hometown as Cindy Sheehan and who don't agree with her statements that what our sons and daughters were risking their lives for was a "noble cause," that the U.S. get out of Palestine (echoing the sentiments of terrorists)and the partisan political statements she continues to make. "Our government is run by one party, every level," Sheehan continued, "and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government." Sheehan also called the 2004 presidential election "the election, quote-unquote, that happened in November."

They didn't agree with Sheehan's support of Lynn Stewart, who was charged with aiding and abetting terrorists who have been trying to kill our U.S. citizens and our children fighting overseas.

Sheehan said she considered Lynne Stewart her Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defended an innocent Black man accused of rape in the book and film “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

“They’re not waging a War on Terror but a War of Terror,” she said. “The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush.” She claimed “it costs $66,000 to recruit one soldier, not including training, and $49,000 a year to house a prisoner, yet only $6,000 per year is spent to educate a child in California. (Recruiting costs are actually $15,000 per soldier, the cost of housing a prisoner in California for one year is $26,000.)

Sheehan continued, “9/11 was Pearl Harbor for the neo-conservatives’ agenda” and declared the U.S. government a “morally repugnant system.” Then she raged:

We have no Constitution. We’re the only country with no checks and balances. We want our country back if we have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog sh-t in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq. It’s OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons but we are waging nuclear war in Iraq, we have contaminated the entire country. It’s not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. Hypocrites! But Israel can occupy Palestine? Stop the slaughter!

Nowhere do the articles indicating media bias indicate that Casey reenlisted in the military, coming home for a period of time and encouraging many young Vacaville adults to enlist. That he was proud of what he was doing and he believed in what he was doing in Iraq.

We, in Vacaville, know the family, knew Casey and know of the difficulties the Sheehans had before and after Casey's death.

We knew of the John Kerry campaign coming out to visit them just after it occurred, as they tried to do with many other families. We knew of the referral to the Fenton Communications agency. Most of us know how she has been used.

Many of us comforted the family. Some of our troops, from Travis Air Force Base faced hostile fire to bring Casey home to his parents. Sheehan was grateful then. Now, she slams them for THEIR wishes that the way they honor their fallen be done in privacy.

Nowhere in the articles by the media on the Vacaville event, did it indicate families of other fallen soldiers were at odds with her or even existed.

Nowhere does it state that while individuals were in the parking lot, during the press conferences, vehicles drove by honking in support.

The story of Vacaville was basically ignored by the SF Chronicle and by the Associated Press, who tried to minimize what occurred.

And what occurred were the long time friends and neighbors of Cindy Sheehan standing behind her during her time of grief and standing up against her during her time of anger. Not only long time friends and neighbors, but families and parents of military members, loved ones of fallen soldiers and those who knew Casey and knew he was a hero.

Most frustrating are the times in which Casey died. In March of that year, John Kerry stood up for Al Sadr, the Muslim Cleric who called in his newspaper for the deaths of U.S. troops. Kerry stated in public radio that Al Sadr had a legitimate voice (to call for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq) and that the military should not have shut down his newspaper. It was Al Sadr's people who killed Casey Sheehan. It was John Kerry who approached her and used her after that occurred. None of us can understand why Cindy Sheehan would embrace someone after that occurred.

So, the REAL story from Vacaville...the truth that the newspapers are not telling you.

To see The Cindy Show Photo Montage:

http://www.americandigest.org/

The Absolute Moral Degeneracy of Cindy Sheehan

IT ALL BEGAN AS IT TOO OFTEN DOES, WITH THE BARREN MAUREEN DOWD searching out still more ideological children who were not cats. In her usual frantic keyboarding, where she constantly demonstrates the ability to type faster than she can think, Dowd pushed out, at some effort, the phrase "absolute moral authority" in describing this ruined woman's quest to get the Celebrity Spotlight on "Me-Me-Me."

This simple, ham-handed cliche launched a thousand cameras and, Shazam!, we've had the Cindy Show, live and not-so-very live, pulsed up from the drainage ditches of Crawford, Texas for the last fortnight. And as always with such media inspired circuses, the usual rag-tag assembly of carping Americans kept dragging in like the rusty, dusty and doomed cast of Carnevale. Crosses were planted. Signs were scrawled or printed and then waved. Banner farms proliferated. Video pundits opined and Oprahettes actually visited to book some compassionate face time with Cindy and the cameras. Hosannas were raised. Editorials scribbled. "Sensitive" interviews performed.

Slowly, a shimmering media glow emerged from Cindy Sheehan as her ability to cry on cue and on camera was being honed. It was like watching a strange simulacra of Bill Clinton and John Kerry emerge from the Mothership in "Close Encounters."

In the end, we had a lovingly sculpted statue of noble suffering lifting her lamp of perfect peace outside the golden door of a better, finer, brighter America that was just, as always, over the far horizon. We had before us a single woman, one of the millions of mothers who have lost sons in all of America's wars, as "Saint Cindy," a Barbara Fritchie in Birkenstocks.

Once this new, improved Cindy was unveiled, we began to see more and more pictures taken from the side and slightly below so that her noble visage etched with suffering might loom larger, might seem to tower into the sky above as she waited, holding her breath and stamping her feet on the mud below. Somewhere in the shadowed background of her Grand Guignol more crosses were being hammered together and having names scribbled on them to be planted, like odious toadstools, in a weedy lot just down the road. It was all just another shabby Leftist set-piece from their inventory of dull exhibits similar to the stuffed mammoths seen behind glass at the Museum of Natural History. Except the whole scene had become the Left's stale revision of the Terry Schiavo scene earlier this year, complete with the full flock of media vultures. To complete the farce, Joan Baez walked on stage and began strumming. Kum ba yah, baby, Kum ba yah.

It wasn't hard to see the Schiavo Circus Redux in this spectacle. It was, absent the slant of the True Believers, pretty much the same in every regard. The only difference was that here we had a woman on moral life support kept upright only by the continual infusion of attention to her own personal suffering that she had chosen to make into a national political spectacle. As such all those who chose to pay attention to it (and there was little way of escaping it short of retiring to a monastery), were hit again and again with the endless damp acknowledgments of her "suffering." It didn't matter if you were for or against the war, it was mandatory that you state your sympathy for "this woman's terrible loss" and affirm that you could not possibly understand her grief without a similar loss. That these assertions were patently false did not diminish the iron-clad requirement for stating them. They became, quickly, the easiest thing in the stories to just glide right over since, right or left, they were such obvious blather. Cindy and her ilk enjoyed them. They were insincere but they were tasty just the same.

But, just as the media glow given to Cindy was at its brightest, the inevitable started to happen. Emerging in the background and, as usual, on the blogs, we learned some rather unsavory details about Cindy Sheehan's long love affair with a politics that would have revolted her dead son. We began to see she was not really honoring her son's memory, but using it.

We began to learn details about her less than noble ideals concerning the fate of Israel, and all politically incorrect others that the Left would gladly send packing from the face of the Earth, if they could only get someone else to make the bombs and pull the triggers. And we began to understand, just a little at first, but with ever growing clarity that what we were seeing was not a mother lost in grief, but a woman who had fallen deeply in love with her son's death and all the wonderful things it could do for her ego. Her son had become just a tool for the advancement of her own poisonous politics. His heroic death had allowed her, as nothing else in her life would have allowed her, to rise from obscurity and be launched into that brief and burning sub-orbit of "Today's media darling" according to, well, the Today Show itself.

Her son had died for a country that, we discovered, she had long despised and which now, in the main, despised her. Her family had denounced her. Her husband had walked away from her ever-expanding bad craziness. For all that is known, the stress of having a daughter glorified and vilified contributed to the stroke of her mother.

All this had happened and, if it were not for the media and the minions of moveon, Cindy would have been a broken and lonely woman. Only by pimping her son's death endlessly to any camera that would focus on her, to any show that would have her on, did Cindy find and keep her precious self-validation whole. And it was "My Precious" to Cindy because, at last, she had become 'real.'

Cindy was real because she had been on television telling her tale of grief, over and over, weeping, over and over, and all the time swearing the one thing that all scoundrels swear when they are working night and day for themselves -- "It's not about Me, it is about My son, My child, My baby." I'm sure we'll see that, in some variation, as Chapter 1, Sentence 1 in the forthcoming Cindy book and made for TV Cindy movie. They will be along in good time. They always are.

I've seen reports from many that as soon as summer is over it will be the end of The Cindy Show as the vultures rise up from the trees above the Crawford circus camp and glide away to the next 24/7 News miracle; that soon it will be "Cindy Who?" That's not true. Cindy has risen beyond our mortal plane, and, by injecting her personal tragedy and metastasizing mania into the cerebral cortex of the country, we'll always remember "The Summer of Cindy." Our shame is that we'll remember it as a nation long after we've forgotten the name of her heroic son and the brave and selfless manner in which he gave "the last full measure of devotion." He was the man known as "Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004."

So spare me the pleas for sympathy and the nickel-and-dime condemnations from barren and arid souls who can no longer comprehend the meaning of Duty, Honor, and Country because they have none of them. Ask me not for a feigned compassion for this disturbed female narcissist. I have reached the outer realms of compassion fatigue with this latest ghoul raised up out of the Sixties cemetery.

I'm saving my compassion and praise and prayers for the soul of the man known as "Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004." Died for his country, died for his ideals, and died trying to rescue his friends and brothers-in-arms. Died, indeed, to defend the right of his mother to use him as a tool to advance political ideas he never would have agreed with. At the start of "The Cindy Show," I was amused. Now I'm just disgusted. It disgusts me that Army Spc. Casey Sheehan also died so that his own mother, Cindy Sheehan, could use him as a stepping stone to her own proto-celebrity; as a way for her to drink deep at the fountain of perpetual funding.

It is not unusual in this culture for people to use friends, family and others as stepping stones in search of celebrity. Becoming a celebrity, even for an instant, is a common hunger in this besotted era, and with the right words and the right angle, the media is always ready to oblige. And oblige. And oblige. Especially if you use a whole new stepping stone to climb on wagon of celebrity, your dead son.

And spare me the self-righteous moans that Cindy was only doing what she believed in and had no inkling that there could be a cornucopia of cash and publicity in it for her. This, as they say, was not Cindy's first rodeo. Cindy Sheehan and her handlers have played the media like a flatulent tuba, and they have achieved their dream. In doing so they believe, in their clouded minds, that they have also achieved "absolute moral authority." In the deepest pit of his utter degeneration, the Marquis de Sade believed the same thing. He too was fundamentally insane. He too got his books published and his "Passion Plays" performed.

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