Cindy Sheehan calls it quits

On Memorial Day, peace activist Cindy Sheehan decided to sell off her 5-acre Camp Casey and stop protesting:

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died 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. 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. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

She says she wants to go back home and be a mom to her surviving children and step down as the "face" of the peace movement. She has harsh words for Democrats and lefties who turned against her, she says, when her criticisms extended beyond George Bush to Democrats who've failed to stop the war:

People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt "two" party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifwhat we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

Read my January 2007 interview with Sheehan.