Posted on 08/15/2005 4:42:36 PM PDT by kristinn
Since a grieving mother started camping out near President Bush's ranch 10 days ago, vowing to remain until he talks to her about the war that killed her son, she says other issues and groups have muddied her mission.
Critics are focusing on Cindy Sheehan's comments that Bush should be impeached, that she won't pay her income taxes, and that Israel should leave Palestine. And among the Web sites running her daily blog is "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore's.
"It's obvious that she is promoting a political agenda," said Kristinn Taylor, co-leader of the Washington, D.C., chapter of FreeRepublic.com, which holds rallies to support troops and counter anti-war demonstrations. "Mrs. Sheehan has spent the past year in the embrace of the radical left of this country."
Unrelated groups also have trekked to her makeshift campsite, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. When others handed out Communist Party leaflets Saturday, they were promptly asked to leave.
Sheehan says it's all been a distraction from her quest in Crawford: a face-to-face meeting with Bush to ask for what noble cause her 24-year-old son Casey died, and to say that the only way to honor soldiers' sacrifices is to stop the war with Iraq. "Our message is to bring the troops home," Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., said Monday. "We're trying to get back to that original goal."
On Monday, the White House again issued a statement saying that Bush sympathizes with Sheehan. The president has given no indication that he will meet with her.
Sheehan and other grieving military families met with Bush in June 2004 at Fort Lewis, near Seattle. That was two months after her son's death and before reports surfaced about faulty pre-war intelligence, which enraged her.
When Sheehan arrived in Crawford on Aug. 6, the day after she spoke at the Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, her small group started marching to Bush's ranch, then was moved by the authorities a few miles away to a triangle plot of land. They camped out in chairs the first night without a flashlight.
Then dozens more came, pitching sleeping tents and canopies along 8-foot-wide shoulders of two roads beside barbed-wire fence-enclosed cow pastures. The two side streets intersect with each other and with Prairie Chapel Road, which leads to the ranch.
Four organizations are directly part of the vigil: Veterans for Peace, Iraqi Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace, a group Sheehan helped found. Code Pink, a grassroots group initiated by women promoting peace and social justice, also has a tent there.
An array of colorful banners "No Blood for Oil" and "Bush Lied; Casey Died" hang from a row of trees. Several portable toilets were brought in last week. Under one tent-like canopy are tables full of food from peanut butter and bread to fruit and a bottle of vanilla and plastic tubs of insect repellant, sunscreen, pain relievers and toothbrushes. Cases of bottled water are stacked several feet high.
The camp also has an attorney specializing in First Amendment and civil rights cases and a public relations firm handling the numerous media calls for Sheehan.
On most days more than 100 people mill around "Camp Casey," about half sleeping there at night. The rest stay at the Crawford Peace House several miles away near downtown Crawford.
Beatriz Saldivar of Fort Worth said she joined the vigil "for all the soldiers who don't have a voice." Her nephew, Daniel Torres, was killed in Iraq last year, leaving behind an unborn daughter due next month. "What are we fighting for?" Saldivar said. "What are we doing there?"
He already met with her and she had positive things to say about that meeting. She knows it, her handlers know it, and the MSM knows it. The entire thing is a huge sham and a coriographed political play that she has been trained for for several months.
They feel they have an unassailable icon because she lost her son...but when she tramples on the service and sacrifice and coffin of that son, and uses it to attack this country, well, she loses that status with me and I believe with most Americans.
She is an anti-american, spiteful, and hateful person who is alienating everyone close to her for her new "friends" who will use her up and toss her to the side, spent and wasted...or (which is looking more and more probable) she will become one of them and be consigned to their own junk heap.
Is it just me or does it sound like this camp is not to clean over all? It sure took them long enough to get portable toilets. Maybe that mystery bottle of vanilla is some sort of holistic left wing remedy to keep from getting dysentery while rolling around in one's own filth.
That just doesn't compute.....
The PIC also should be a full page ad in every major newspaper in this country.
Actually, the fact that it is not prominantly displayed on the MSM is proof positive that they are (as we already know) so abjectly slanted in their coverage that they are not worthy of our notice.
Casey Sheehan's actions in life are the antithesis of and a direct repudiation of Cindy Sheehan's views and actions!
It's got to be getting pretty rank around there by now.
A few more things this part of the country has in abundance:
Rabid Coons, possums and skunks
All attracted to food laying out and smells.
Suicide bomb-belt alert! She's nuts and she talked about the secret service killing her for a reason I presume.
It's obvious that this woman has gone totally off her rocker.
Left wing loonies are just using her
The fact that anyone can ask this question and get it published is proof that the media has failed in its job to accurately inform the public. Disagreeing with what we are fighting for or questioning how it's being done could be reasonable questions depending on the circumstances and one's own POV. But not knowing the reasons should be the province of small children and monkeys. The MSM is fully culpable in this national ignorance.
Nice writing! It has a flow to it.
Banners - toilets!
Another BIMBO Alert.
It's a lie; the Niger documents came out in late 2002 because Bush used the 16 words in the State of the Union; plus, one of her good friends, Joe Wilson, wrote his article in July of 2003.
She was on with Matthews, too; he was HORRIBLE to her, yelling at her and kept asking "Who are we fighting in Iraq."
He was a lot more STRIDENT with the Iraqi woman than he was with Sheehan.
You've got that right. This story would be nothing without their (MSMs) complicit help in coverage and in deliberately ignoring her contradictions and obvious agenda.
All without "cosulting" his mama. Telling, eh?
A guest on Michael Medved's show today, Phil Keever (sp?), an Iraq vet, met with Cindy, and is claiming that she isn't really camping. He says she is actually spending her nights at a local motel.
Well, well.......just like back in the good old days of 1968 when they held the "Poor People's March" to Washington.
They all put on their overalls and flew first class. I know because I made the reservations for them.
And when the Vietnam Vets camped on the Mall, John Kerry stayed in a dorm at Georgetown.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.