Cindy Sheehan Quits Post as "Face" of Anti-War Movement

According to her blog, Cindy Sheehan has decided to step down from her anti-war protests, saying that "I am going to 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."

Sheehan claims that "I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party" but that "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."

Sheehan began protesting the war when her son, Casey Sheehan, died in early 2004. She first gained international attention in August of 2005 when she traveled to Crawford, Texas, home of George W. Bush, and created a peace camp named "Camp Casey," vowing to remain on the land until she gained a personal meeting with the president. A supporter of Sheehan, Fred Mattlage, subsequently offered her a piece of land closer to Bush's ranch to set up permanently. According to Sheehan, the parcel of land that is Camp Casey is now "for sale," noting that she "will consider any reasonable offer."

Despite her popularity with war protesters, Sheehan was not an uncontroversial figure. For example, on her blog, she complained that Hurricane Rita was getting too much coverage, saying that "it is a little wind and a little rain." As Sheehan herself noted, she became increasingly unpopular with many of her supporters in the left as her continued criticism of the government was non-partisan.

Don't expect Sheehan to disappear entirely, however. She writes that "This is not my "Checkers" moment, because 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, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system."

Sources:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sheehan