Republican for President? by Cindy Sheehan

When I opposed the wars and oppression of civil rights here at home during the Bush scandal, there was a certain segment of the population I knew I could always count on to be in solidarity with me: Liberal Democrats.

While George Bush was president and Congress was primarily of a Republican nature, even organizations like MoveOn.org and blogs like the Daily Kos were on my side. I attended HUGE protests in 2005-2006 before the Democrats took control of Congress in the elections of 2006—but after that, the protests began to weaken or evaporate. Once when there was an event in DC on the 5^th Anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in 2008, I was told by the lead organization that it didn’t want Cindy Sheehan “anywhere near Washington DC.”

I, and many others, were in favor of a large demo in DC that year, as we always did, but one of the lead antiwar(Bush) organizations actually told us, since Democrats were in the majority in the House and they were continuing to fund Bush’s wars and not impeach him, that a demo in DC would, “embarrass the Democrats.”

Now that we have had two years of a complete Democratic tyranny in DC and almost four years of a Democratic regime in the White House, the antiwar movement has continued its tailspin because it was mostly populated by “liberal" Democrats, or other Democratic functionaries like the Communist Party, USA.

A recent poll commissioned by the Washington Post shows, that by a vast majority “Liberal” Democrats favor keeping Guantanamo Prison (53%) camp and torture facility open and the drone bombing campaigns (77%) that their president has increased by at least 300 percent over the Bush years. Unbelievably, “liberal” Democrats also are in favor of the Presidential Assassination Program where Obama can have any American executed by his order, only. Trials? Like John Yoo’s Constitution, these anachronisms will soon be considered “quaint.”

What Glenn Greenwald recently, in his column at Salon, called: “Repulsive progressive hypocrisy,” I called “Faux-gressivism” over three years ago. I began to read the writing on the wall in 2006 when Nancy Pelosi kept saying that, “impeachment is off the table” in the election that propelled her to a brief House Speakership—and the consequences of this political perfidy have been dire for tens of thousands of people who would have mattered when Bush was president, but somehow don’t seem to matter so much now.

“But, Cindy, John McCain would have been worse,” I have heard that tired refrain at least 500 times since 2009, and who knows, maybe he would have been, maybe not. My Republican friends voted for George Bush in 2004 because, even though his lies killed their friend, Casey, they told me that he was going to singlehandedly overturn Roe v. Wade. Many people voted for Obama in 2008 because he promised to close Guantanamo. The last time I looked, Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, and now principled opposition to torture and illegal detention has apparently turned into undying support (until a Republican is back in the Oval Office).

If one of the Republican candidates becomes president in 2012, will the innocent people being slaughtered by US drones matter to these “Faux-gressives” again? Will the antiwar movement be brought back from the dead as, all of a sudden, antiwar feelings are reawakened in people who would have become apoplectic over a Bush invasion of Libya, but were strangely silent or loudly cheerleading the “humanitarian intervention” of Obama’s? Will spying, torture, and the sharp erosion of our civil liberties here at home become anathema once again?

Besides being told 500 times that, “McCain would have been worse,” I have also heard, or seen myself, being called, “an extremist” or “ideologue” by some of the very same people who gave me awards and wrote glowing pieces about me just a few years back. If a Republican once again takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, will I, once again, become smart and courageous?

To me, in the perpetual political hypnosis and hypocrisy that exists in this nation, the most tragic thing is that the dead, too numerous to actually count, were used by the Faux-gressives as convenient weapons to bludgeon Bush and the Republican party, but were so easily discarded as garbage on the dung heap of US electoral politics when victory was declared by the Democratic warniks.

Well, I am going to tell you for the 500^th time, that it really doesn’t matter who is in the White House-- the Empire will crush everyone it rolls over without any qualms—and those people and their loves, dreams, struggles, and, especially their lives, always, always, always matter. Period. 

I now know that to most "liberal" Democrats, killing by the Imperial Army is only considered wrong if a Republican does it-- so, even though it is a false concern, we are at least able to predict that if a Republican is elected, we will see people out in the streets protesting those murders.