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Sheehan says dems useless and americans shallow { May 29 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007481948http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007481948
Cindy Sheehan Quits Peace Movement; Blast Democrats And Republicans For War
May 29, 2007 9:25 a.m. EST
William Macklin - AHN Staff Reporter
Atlanta, GA (AHN) - Cindy Sheehan, who turned her grief over the death of her soldier son in Iraq into an anti-war protest that drew international attention, says she's getting out of the peace movement after being repudiated by the "so-called left," and "slandered and libeled by the right."
In a lengthy letter posted Monday on the liberal online community, Daily Kos, Sheehan wrote that she had "come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning," then went on to blast partisans on both sides of the war issue, saying she had been scorned by the peace movement after she condemned Democrats for failing to force a quick end to the war.
"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," wrote Sheehan in the entry titled, "Good Riddance Attention Whore."
"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," Sheehan wrote.
Sheehan became an international figure in the anti-war movement when she protested U.S. involvement in Iraq by camping outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2005. Sheehan demanded to meet with Bush about the death of her son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, 24, who was killed in April, 2004, while serving in Iraq.
Sheehan never got a meeting with Bush, but she attracted an army of followers, became a high-profile member of the peace movement, and launched the group, Gold Star Families for Peace as a network for anti-war military families.
In her letter, Sheehan said she had sacrificed her 29-year marriage and her relationships with her surviving children to the cause of peace and to a political system that was too inflexible to listen and respond.
"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance," Sheehan wrote. "I failed my boy and that hurts the most."
Sheehan also decried in-fighting among factions within the peace movement saying "it is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions," and chastised political leaders for abandoning "our brave young men and women in Iraq.," and treating them "like pawns on a chessboard of destruction."
She said her son had died in vain fighting for a "country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."
Sheehan described her online message as "my resignation letter as the `face' of the American anti-war movement," and said she would "take whatever I have left and go home."
"I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."
In an interview with CNN, Sheehan's sister, DeDe Miller, said Gold Star Familes for Peace would continue working for humanitarian causes, but would end its involvement in the anti-war movement. Miller said, Sheehan "cried for quite a bit" after writing her online letter.
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