(Cross-posted from Lotus.)

I’m sure you have all seen this.

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed…. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes. …

I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. …

However, 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. 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.”

Some of us did, Cindy. And some of us saw this coming. Back on January 14, I wrote this:

Ten days ago, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel was holding a press conference announcing a Democratic measure intended to place a couple of largely meaningless but good-sounding restrictions on lobbyists. Cindy Sheehan and a group of fellow protesters disrupted the event with signs and chants calling for an end to the Iraq War - and she was roundly denounced for it by a variety of people who were more than willing to cheer her on when her target was Bush instead of Democrats. She was called “stupid, unthinking and politically naive” for staging a “circus.” She is “a fool,” we were assured, who is “against everyone but her own rabid fans” and whose “pompous spectacle,” backed by her “yappy, worshipping, poodle cult,” was an “inept outburst” marked by “self-important impatience” and “shrill posturing.” She was told to “shut up” and to “put a sock in it.” …

My first reaction was to say just who the flaming hell do you people think you are? Who among you has done a fraction of what Cindy Sheehan has, committed a fraction of the time or energy, either physical or emotional, to stopping this madness? What is she, just a tool, a convenience, to be discarded now that you’ve got what you want? “Hey, Democrats won the election. So shut up.”

And then my second reaction set in: Yes, that’s exactly what she is to you. Just a living press release, just another campaign commercial, a campaign that for you is now ended. For you, for way too many among us, including way too many of the so-called “liberal” or “progressive” bloggers, support for Cindy Sheehan or any other protesters was never actually about the war. It was about electing Democrats.

So now she needs to call it quits. Contrary to the expected post hoc vituperation and the milder opinions, I did not find her farewell “less than gracious,” as one put it. I found it spot on. And I did not find it, as others did, bitter. Rather I found it an expression of pain born of a legitimate sense of betrayal by people she thought were friends and supporters - and who damn well should have been.

Interestingly, Sheehan writes that

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike.

But she also sees the US becoming “a fascist corporate wasteland” with a society “beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think,” adding “I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A.”

Cindy Sheehan, you are a radical, an honorable title to be worn proudly. Just like some of us were during Vietnam, you have been radicalized by the war, by the senseless, monstrous waste of it all. The scales have fallen from your eyes and you no longer “see through a glass darkly.” You’ve seen truth, and know that Iraq can’t be separated from the rest of US foreign and military policy, something to which those who condemned your visit to Venezuela still blind themselves, nor can those policies abroad be separated from those at home.

I know you said this:

Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

But truth be told, I’m confident that after a rest you will be back. Likely in a quiet way, not out front, maybe even just on local matters, but you’ll be back. Because you have been radicalized by reality. And from that, there is no turning back.

But for now, go in peace, Cindy, with gratitude (and admiration) for the stamina and courage you showed.

Mr. Cantu drove the entire 1.5 miles of the tunnel from Weehawken, N.J., to Manhattan, tearing his way under the Hudson River in the tunnel’s center tube and peeling back the roof of his tractor-trailer as if it were a tin can. No one was injured, but an undetermined number of decorative tunnel ceiling tiles were ripped off.

I feel bad for Mr. Cantu. He made a mistake and he has gone from anonymous guy doing his job, to media laughingstock.

But…

There are a couple of items I want to point out in this story:

1 - He’s from Texas.

2 - A spokesman from the Port Authority said this: “There were enough bells and whistles going off that this should not have happened.”
3 - A representative from his company had this to say: “He misjudged …, and once he was inside it he didn’t realize the damage he was doing.”

Now who else could we say those three things about?

My apologies for the downtime.

We were having faulty database issues.  Many thanks to Moonbatty for getting us up & running again.  I’ve taken the liberty of posting Brixton’s last three ‘toons - check ‘em out - they are as brilliant as usual.

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2 days ago I was heading into the subway when people start pouring out the turnstiles.  Turns out there were two guys fighting on the train car, a bike messenger and a corporate type guy.  I head into the fray seeing that everyone had been standing around doing nothing, although someone had called the police.  So I jump in and break them up.
As soon as I did the messenger backed off and a few seconds later the cops got there and held back Corporate Guy.

The reason people suck is not that the guys were fighting.  It’s that literally HUNDREDS of people, some bigger than me were just standing around watching these guys wail away at each other.   I had to push my way in to break it up.  How is it that so many people could just watch this, these guys are human beings (well, maybe not the corporate guy ) and there was no hint of basic decency.

People suck.

Jerry Falwell has died.

Proper decorum mandates that I not speak ill of the pastor.

Screw that.

He leaves this world a bit worse for him being a part of it.  He was a bigot and a blowhard.   He was delusional, and he insisted that he knew what God wanted and that he was just the man to make it happen.  He bilked money from people desperate for hope and he used that to enrich himself.

Some history:

• He was an early segregationist and called the Civil Rights Movement “Civil Wrongs.”  Although he eventually changed his mind (even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut), he did much damage.
• He opposed equal rights for homosexuals - not just gay marriage, but the rights of homosexuals to not be discriminated against in hiring.
• He blamed 9/11 on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”
• He said: “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.”
• He said: “The idea of separation of church and state was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
• He said: “Feminists hate men.  They’re sexist.  They hate men - that’s their problem.”
• He said: “If you’re not a born again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

So now he’s dead.

I ain’t weeping.

Yet another famous George completely out of touch with reality…

Lucas told me he has seen all the summer movies since his company, Industrial Light and Magic, does most of the special effects. The only one they didn’t work on was “Spider-Man 3.” What did he think of it?

“It’s silly. It’s a silly movie,” he said. “There just isn’t much there. Once you take it all apart, there’s not much story, is there?”

Well, it’s not “Star Wars.”

“People thought ‘Star Wars’ was silly, too,” he added, with a wink. “But it wasn’t.”

Uhhhh, George? I have only one response to that…

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