9/20: When General Petraeus’ testified before Congress this month, he did nothing but uphold the unjust and murderous war in Iraq, praise the Bush administration’s surge, and argue for keeping the US military in Iraq and in the Middle East as a whole. This outraged millions of people in this country who want to see and end to this war.
MoveOn.org published an ad with the headline “GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?”. In response, Bush and Congress have declared this kind of criticism completely out of order. Today, Bush called the ad “disgusting” and said, “I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus but on the U.S. military.”
And today, the Senate passed a resolution condemning the MoveOn ad. Only 24 Democrats (yes, the supposedly anti-war Party) voted against resolution!
What does this say about “official politics” in America in 2007?
MoveOn.org
hardly has taken the most radical stand against the Bush administration
and the war on Iraq. It has not refused to call for an immediate end
to the war, instead only demanding some kind of timetable for
withdrawal. It has refused to call for Bush’s impeachment. And it has
pinned people’s hopes on getting Democrats elected in 2008 as the means
to make political change, when these same Democrats refuse to demand
and immediate end to the war or Bush’s impeachment.
Yet even
MoveOn’s rather mild critique and dead-end strategy for political
change are beyond the pale of reasonable political discourse to those
in power. This Senate resolution is nothing but a blatant suppression of any dissent against the Bush administration’s policies. John McCain even went so far as to say that MoveOn should be thrown out of the country! And this is a man running for president! This has very dangerous implications for the ability to dissent and resist in a country where the Patriot Act is law, where secret spying is legal, where Arabs, Muslims, and now Mexican immigrants are rounded up by government agents, where protests are spied on and attacked, and where Jose Padilla was recently held for years on the President’s say-so, tortured, and now convicted of what amounts to a though crime!
This just amplifies even more the urgent need to millions of people
to break out of the confines of “official politics” and build truly
massive political resistance to stop the war and drive out the Bush
regime (just look at what happened in Jena, Louisiana today for some
inspiration).
This official condemnation of MoveOn is completely
outrageous and should be opposed by everyone who wants this war to
end. Moreover, it’s way past time to refuse to allow what goes on in
Congress to set the limits on our political activity. Break of the
this suffocating stranglehold! Start by organizing to protest Bush’s speech at the UN Sept. 25th.
Cindy Sheehan on General Betray-Us and MoveOn.org, 9/21/07
I have often been critical of MoveOn.org, basically because
I feel, for the most part that they support Democrats to the detriment of
democracy. However, MoveOn.org was a big help to me at Camp Casey
in August “05 and organized the thousands of candlelight vigils that occurred
across the country. I will always be grateful to them for that.
I had a policy when my children were younger. I would always
try to catch them doing something “right” (sharing, being kind, etc) and I
would praise them and give them a treat. In that vein, I have to give my 100%
support to MoveOn.org in regards to their right-on ad in the NYT that has
become even the object of a Senate denouncement.
It must be hard for MoveOn.org to have 21 Democratic
Senators vote to denounce the ad when MoveOn.org has been so supportive of the
party. However, I don’t think that it’s appropriate for the Senate to be voting
on newspaper ads, when it is a clear 1st Amendment right of anyone in our
representative republic to place such ads, whether one agrees with
them or not, and with almost half the Senate Dems voting to denounce MoveOn’s
freedom of speech and the Dem leadership taking impeachment “off the table” and
giving BushCo more latitude to spy on us, I wonder which part of our
Constitution the Dems will defile next?
Today, George, in his unbridled and un-matched arrogance and
just abject stupidity called the MoveOn ad “disgusting.” What I find more
disgusting is a cowardly Commander in Chief and all of his supposed underlings
lying to our country and the world and sending our young troops to fight, die,
be wounded and kill innocent people when they were too “busy” to do the same in
their mistake of a war: Vietnam.
What I find disgusting is CNN (where I just saw Eli Parisier
of MoveOn debate a pro-war person) rarely criticizes the occupation or shows
the tragic consequences of this war and they are raising money so a poor Iraqi
boy can have reconstructive surgery on his badly burned face. That is great,
but what about examining the reasons little Youssif was burned in the first
place and start calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops? What about the
millions of other Iraqis who have been wounded or displaced? Who is telling
their stories and raising money for them to be whole and have homes?
What I find disgusting is General Betray-Us allowing himself
to be used as a political force field for the lying administration and lying
himself. Sectarian violence is not down 80%, the General Accounting Office
report and the fact that hundreds of Iraqis are killed every month 50,000 leave
their homes on a monthly basis directly contradict those “facts.” The only
reason some places are safer in Iraq
is because the neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed and the sectarian
militias are providing security to small geographic areas. In the very violent
south; Shi”a Mahdi are fighting Shi”a Badr. It is a disaster that needs to be
faced and solved now, not put away until the spring or prolonged so Dems can
get the White House back in ’08.
General Betray-Us has not only betrayed America and his oath of service,
but he has betrayed the very troops he should care about more than being an
“ass-kissing little chicken-shit” to a Commander in Chief who has spent years
betraying the troops. It is time to truly support our troops and start
withdrawing them immediately. Not to “pre-surge” levels but to “pre-invasion”
levels. It is time to listen to the people of Iraq
and force the mercenary killers and other contractors to leave and give the
people of Iraq
back their jobs (50% unemployment rate in some areas, some areas higher) and
their country.
The occupation of Iraq is a disaster and I applaud
MoveOn for moving a little closer to the true “anti-war” movement and encourage
them to come with us farther.
Anyone who is concerned with the rapid slide to fascism
should be supporting MoveOn in this battle.
Anyone who cares about democracy over Democrats (or
Rethugs) should join me in supporting MoveOn in this particular struggle
and in bringing MoveOn more fully to the table with the peace movement.
Thanks MoveOn for speaking for the majority of Americans and
please stick to your so-called guns. The struggle is worthwhile.