Cindy Sheehan: Victim of Agent Provocateur?
That seems to be the only logical explanation for her to go down to Venezuela and embrace Hugo Chavez:
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela joined Cindy Sheehan, the American antiwar activist, on Sunday to attack President Bush and promised to support her protest against the Iraq war.
Mr. Chavez has become a voice for many opponents of the Bush administration's policies who are drawn to his self-styled socialist revolution and his close alliance with the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.
"Enough of imperialist aggression; we must tell the world: down with the U.S. empire," Mr. Chavez said as he hugged Ms. Sheehan, whose son died in the Iraq war, and the widow of the Puerto Rican independence advocate Filiberto Ojeda Raos, who was killed in a gunfight with the police last year.
"We have to bury imperialism this century," Mr. Chavez told her on his Sunday television broadcast. "Cindy, we are with you in your fight."
I personally have nothing against Chavez and his socialistic-nationalistic programs. But Ms. Sheehan has won the sympathies of millions of mainstream Americans and has become a strong symbol of opposition to the Iraq war. She is risking her credibility by associating with Chavez at this point in time.
Her enemies can now smear her as anti-American, a friend of Fidel, etc.
Someone manuevered her down to South America.
I smell a mole.
posted by Effwit at 12:29 PM
9 Comments:
Sheehan has gotten extremely off point in her dialogue, as many have pointed out. Her initial message was one of wanting answers for why her son had to die for the War in Iraq; a question that had to be posed, for certain. But now, she's all over the damn place, inserting opinions on foreign policy and other matters not related to the original question. I don't want to question her intelligence on such matters; I don't know her at all, so it wouldn't be prudent for anyone, much less me, to do that.
However, when you start going on trips to Venezuela and appear with a guy who's been known to bad mouth the government, you're setting yourself up to become a right-wing cariacture. In other words, she's now an easy buzzword for the right-wing noise machine. Sheehan should have had the intelligence to know that anything outside of the focal point of her protest against the president would be interpreted as such, especially by the sycophant media and the right. I'm sad to say, her message is now officially lost in the sidebar, and her credibility is shot, by even showing up there.
VCthree:
Exactly.
She seems to have neutralized herself (or been neutralized by someone's plan.)
I find it all very suspicious.
You are correct about how the right will use this against the entire anti-war movement.
It's a shame.
Talk about going completely off-message. Say it ain't so, Cindy!
She really has marginalized her cause and her message, which really is sad. What the hell is she thinking? Or, who is the agent provocateur who has led her astray?
Any impact she might have had on the public consciousness regarding the war in Iraq is now long gone.
I also read that she is considering running for the Senate against Diane Feinstein. Good luck with that.
Drew L:
If she was led astray, as I believe, it was a brilliant move on the part of the war-mongers.
They no longer have to really worry about her appealing to ordinary Americans. The ones who have the power to stop the war if their numbers ever swell to a critical mass.
Cindy was a threat to the war machine precisely because any parent could sympathize with her predicament.
Now she will be lumped with the Woody Harrelson crowd, i.e. the fellow travelers.
As to who the provocateur is, who knows?
However, if I was a member of Cindy's group and knew the participants, I am quite sure that I could pick out the offender.
Very lucid, probably right. If the administration can't make her go away they are better to discredit her. They're probably better discrediting her in the first place actually since that discredits her supporters by association in some small way. My blog is still down, I will have to move it to blogspot I think.
Stonefruit:
I happen to be rather fond of Chavez and what he stands for.
And I share your opinion about the chickenshit nature of the opposition to the war.
I was only making the point that this will be used against the anti-war forces by the right. That she must have been intentionally led down the garden path by government agents.
Cindy's only appeal to most people was precisely her ordinariness (if that's a word).
That asset has now been lost.
We have seen this time and again.
P.S.: I wasn't celebrating this development.
Jeremy:
Yeah, the national security state is very good at arranging this sort of thing.
"Dirty tricks 'R US"
You may indeed want to migrate your blog over to Blogspot, you can at least cut and paste your old content into a new blog there.
And you may be able to re-publish the whole thing with the click of a button, I just don't know.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/31/sheehan.arrest/index.html
Interesting developments regarding Cindy Sheehan at the SOTU address tonight. Supposedly she was arrested for wearing a t-shirt with an anti-war slogan. And while I think her sojourn to Venezuela was not the wisest of moves, for them to arrest her is just ludicrous. Again, what is it we're standing for in this country? It's as bad as during the election season in 2004 when people wearing buttons or t-shirts critical of Bush were physically escorted from and/or arrested at Bush rallies.
It's just wrong. And Bush goes on tonight to call the U.S. a beacon of freedom and democracy? What hypocrisy!
Drew L:
It is pure political suppression.
The tool who was hosting SOTU coverage on ABC stated that Cindy was carrying a "banner."
I immediately knew this was bullshit.
So it was a t-shirt.
Nice.
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