Cindy re-energized the anti war movement

The messages you are viewing are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select the boards given in left menu

The unmarried mother's story about giving birth to a child diagnosed as terminally ill in the womb hit a major nerve on the Internet.

Every night for the last two months, thousands of abortion opponents across the nation logged on to a blog run by the suburban Chicago woman who identified herself only as "B" or "April's Mom."

People said they prayed that God would save her pregnancy. They e-mailed her photos of their children dressed in pink, bought campaign T-shirts, shared tales of personal heartache and redemption, and sent letters and gifts to an Oak Lawn P.O. box in support.

As more and more people were drawn to her compelling tale, eager advertisers were lining up. And established parenting Web sites that oppose abortion were promoting her blog -- which included biblical quotes, anti-abortion messages and a soundtrack of inspirational Christian pop songs.

By Sunday night, when "April's Mom" claimed to have given birth to her "miracle baby" -- blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later -- her Web site had nearly a million hits.

Not the pregnancy, and not the photos posted on the blog of the supposed mother and Baby April Rose, swaddled in white blankets. The baby was actually a lifelike doll, which immediately raised the suspicion of loyal blog-followers.

"I have that exact doll in my house," said Elizabeth Russell, a dollmaker from Buffalo who had been following the blog. "As soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a scam."
--
She had expected only a handful of friends to read it, but when her first post got 50 comments, she was hooked.

"I've always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear," Beushausen said.

"Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand," she said. "I didn't know how to stop. ... One lie led to another."

So the lie isn't the problem, but the fact that she got addicted to blogging made her continue on. What a sad and disgusting tale. Using a phony story to whip up the anti-choice movement is pretty vile. A woman has the right to choose in this country, but the religious right will do anything it can to try and take that right away. You never hear them talk about the mother in any of their debates. It's like the woman is only a "vessel" to carry a child and doesn't exist in any other manner. "Bring the vessel here." "How dare the vessel speak out."

I wanted to address an exchange below that occurred between myself and a couple of others on the board (just the big bad and another poster who did not use anything to identify herself) last night. In response to my post about the righteous prevailing meaning the Israeli's would prevail because they are the "righteous", just the big bad responded "So was Hitler righteous?" She was likening the Israeli's treatment of the Palestinians as being akin to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. I then pointed out her anti-Semitic rhetoric. To which I was blasted for accusing an anti-Zionist as being an anti-Semitic.

I want to point out to many of you who hold strong opinions regarding the Israel/Palestinian conflict, there is a very fine line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, a line that was very clearly crossed when just the big bag posted her Hitler remark, a line many have crossed in this discussion by likening the Gaza Strip to a concentration camp. When you say these things you have become an anti-Semitic. Below is an excerpt from an article written by Ami Isseroff:

If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you've done no more than cluck "well, yes, very bad about Darfur";

if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won't blame 'in the final analysis' on Israelis;

if your sneer at the Zionists doesn't sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;

then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won't let you get away with a self-exonerating formula "I am anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic" to prevent scrutiniy. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don't use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.

I'm someone who believes in minding my own business. What others do in their family lives is none of my business. There hasn't been one single (or married) gay person who has ever hurt me.

On the other hand, the policies of the last eight years have hurt me a great deal. I don't have health insurance, so McCain can't tax mine, but he will tax everyone else's.

I want a President who can speak English (for a change), one who is intelligent and even tempered, and one who not only acknowledges that there is a huge problem with the middle class but whose entire platform has been devoted to solving that problem.

One day, McCain says the "fundamentals of the economy are strong." The next day, he's canceling a debate to rush back to Washington to fix the "crisis," except that he doesn't really "rush," and he didn't cancel the debate. He's running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Obama's slogan has always been change, from the very beginning, and McCain has stolen that slogan.

I'm just personally sick and tired of politicians who are pro-corporations and anti-Americans.

Corporate tax breaks simply don't work. The beneficiaries of these breaks pocket the money. They don't create jobs; they outsource them. As MTs, we should know that more than anyone.

Obama wants to reward businesses who KEEP jobs in America. That's why I voted for him, along with the other reasons above, and that's why my daughter and son-in-law also voted for him, so he has received three votes from this household alone.

The "trickle-down" theory doesn't work and depends on the non-existent benevolence of greedy executives. It's time to try the "trickle-up" theory, IMHO.

Everyone is so upset at the thought of rising taxes. I wish someone would tell me just HOW we expect to pay for all Bush's wars, as this will fall to the next President, along with the present financial fiasco.

This is George Bush�s Accountability Moment

This is George Bush�s accountability moment. That�s why I�m here. The mainstream media aren�t holding him accountable. Neither is Congress. So I�m not leaving Crawford until he�s held accountable. It�s ironic, given the attacks leveled at me recently, how some in the media are so quick to scrutinize -- and distort -- the words and actions of a grieving mother but not the words and actions of the president of the United States.

But now it�s time for him to level with me and with the American people. I think that�s why there�s been such an outpouring of support. This is giving the 61 percent of Americans who feel that the war is wrong something to do -- something that allows their voices to be heard. It�s a way for them to stand up and show that they DO want our troops home, and that they know this war IS a mistake� a mistake they want to see corrected. It�s too late to bring back the people who are already dead, but there are tens of thousands of people still in harm�s way.

There is too much at stake to worry about our own egos. When my son was killed, I had to face the fact that I was somehow also responsible for what happened. Every American that allows this to continue has, to some extent, blood on their hands. Some of us have a little bit, and some of us are soaked in it.

People have asked what it is I want to say to President Bush. Well, my message is a simple one. He�s said that my son -- and the other children we�ve lost -- died for a noble cause. I want to find out what that noble cause is. And I want to ask him: �If it�s such a noble cause, have you asked your daughters to enlist? Have you encouraged them to go take the place of soldiers who are on their third tour of duty?� I also want him to stop using my son�s name to justify the war. The idea that we have to �complete the mission� in Iraq to honor Casey�s sacrifice is, to me, a sacrilege to my son�s name. Besides, does the president any longer even know what �the mission� really is over there?

Casey knew that the war was wrong from the beginning. But he felt it was his duty to go, that his buddies were going, and that he had no choice. The people who send our young, honorable, brave soldiers to die in this war, have no skin in the game. They don�t have any loved ones in harm�s way. As for people like O�Reilly and Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh and all the others who are attacking me and parroting the administration line that we must complete the mission there -- they don�t have one thing at stake. They don�t suffer through sleepless nights worrying about their loved ones

Before this all started, I used to think that one person couldn�t make a difference... but now I see that one person who has the backing and support of millions of people can make a huge difference.

That�s why I�m going to be out here until one of three things happens: It�s August 31st and the president�s vacation ends and he leaves Crawford. They take me away in a squad car. Or he finally agrees to speak with me.

If he does, he�d better be prepared for me to hold his feet to the fire. If he starts talking about freedom and democracy -- or about how the war in Iraq is protecting America -- I�m not going to let him get away with it.

While Cindy S. may be authentic about being a grieving mother. Her past actions compared with her actions recently don't prove her to be authentic. The point was her son volunteered to go into the armed forces. Maybe she was behind him going into the military, because she thought his going into the military meant he'd get to travel and get tuition for college, and it never crossed her mind that he would have to go to war (unrealistic way to think about serving in the armed forces in the first place) but if she had these convictions when Casey signed up then she should have been pleading for him not to enlist.

Okay, let's look at that scenario. Let's say she did plead with him him not to, because her convictions about war were exactly as they are today. That would only prove that Casey did not hold the same convictions that she did. So, in that case she is not being "authentic" in channeling what her dead son would think of her protest. She needs to go home and take care of her younger son who is pleading for her to come home, and try to heal an obviously broken marriage, but that would put a cramp in getting her face on camera.

As far as I'm concerned Pat Buchanan has nothing to do with this whole scenario. He's just another politician with another opinion, and those are about a dime a dozen.

sooo...because she did not use meth, crank, crack, etc - it's OKAY. (I guess when your'e filthy rich - IT IS)..wonder if you would feel that way if she were poor....it is as if you are DEFENDING her...sad...

They guestimate that there were tens of thousands of protesters there with her with over 1600 vigiles this week.

CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms. Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the United States in 2001.

When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts. But when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam r�sum�s: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character, then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's "wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son. But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the media circus by actually meeting with her.

The failure of the smear campaign against Cindy Sheehan is yet another historical marker in the collapse of support for the Iraq war.

Cindy re-energized the anti war movement

This is George Bush�s Accountability Moment

The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan