Commissioners Decision in Crawford
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WOW! The situation in Crawford just continues to fill my heart with joy and only add to the fact I believe a movement has started that will not stop. A revolution is afoot, I'm telling you.
Today the County Commissioners of Mclennan County, TX, decided to delay a vote on the motion to ban demonstrations along Prairie Chapel Road, the main entrance to the Bush vacation compound. The delay is to last four weeks, which will ensure that the Peaceful Occupation of Crawford (as this has been dubbed) will continue. VICTORY! Lawyers and citizens alike successfully argued and pressured the commissioners to delay any action till after the situation in Crawford lulls at the end of the month.
A compromise appears to have been reached as well between a neighbor of the 43rd President, in which Cindy can relocate herself and her followers to their ranch, closer to the Vacation-in-Chief, and right in-between him and the church he and Laura attend while in seclusion. It's closer, out of the ditch, and allows for a much easier hop, jump, and skip to the front porch of Prairie Chapel Ranch.
For those not aware, last night in the middle of the night a crazy redneck decided to plow through over 500 of the crosses that were placed along Prairie Chapel Road. The area where the crosses were placed has been named "Arlington West," in reference to the breathtaking similarities to Arlington Memorial Cemetery in DC. The Mclennan County Sheriff’s department arrested the man who committed this horrendous crime immediately. Already someone has graciously and quickly begun working on replacing the over 500 crosses that were destroyed overnight. So this is the measure of the opposition’s patriotism? To deface and destroy crosses that are a remembrance of men and women who have perished in combat for reasons that are right or wrong is absolutely disgusting. May the individual rest in hell. Pictures of this atrocity can be found at the following link.
I will continue to keep all posted as I learn more. For those interested, an online community has been created by the Crawford Peace House. Also, a pizza fund has been established to feed the hundreds of volunteers and supporters in Crawford. A Waco pizza place set up an account for folks to funnel money into, and they will deliver pizzas out to Crawford. The online community has more details. As fellow college students, we all know the value of pizza, so if you can do without a pan for one night, send along the money you would spend on that to Crawford. Without a doubt, you will be helping a worthy cause. Click on the link above under "Crawford Peace House" in this paragraph.
Today the County Commissioners of Mclennan County, TX, decided to delay a vote on the motion to ban demonstrations along Prairie Chapel Road, the main entrance to the Bush vacation compound. The delay is to last four weeks, which will ensure that the Peaceful Occupation of Crawford (as this has been dubbed) will continue. VICTORY! Lawyers and citizens alike successfully argued and pressured the commissioners to delay any action till after the situation in Crawford lulls at the end of the month.
A compromise appears to have been reached as well between a neighbor of the 43rd President, in which Cindy can relocate herself and her followers to their ranch, closer to the Vacation-in-Chief, and right in-between him and the church he and Laura attend while in seclusion. It's closer, out of the ditch, and allows for a much easier hop, jump, and skip to the front porch of Prairie Chapel Ranch.
For those not aware, last night in the middle of the night a crazy redneck decided to plow through over 500 of the crosses that were placed along Prairie Chapel Road. The area where the crosses were placed has been named "Arlington West," in reference to the breathtaking similarities to Arlington Memorial Cemetery in DC. The Mclennan County Sheriff’s department arrested the man who committed this horrendous crime immediately. Already someone has graciously and quickly begun working on replacing the over 500 crosses that were destroyed overnight. So this is the measure of the opposition’s patriotism? To deface and destroy crosses that are a remembrance of men and women who have perished in combat for reasons that are right or wrong is absolutely disgusting. May the individual rest in hell. Pictures of this atrocity can be found at the following link.
I will continue to keep all posted as I learn more. For those interested, an online community has been created by the Crawford Peace House. Also, a pizza fund has been established to feed the hundreds of volunteers and supporters in Crawford. A Waco pizza place set up an account for folks to funnel money into, and they will deliver pizzas out to Crawford. The online community has more details. As fellow college students, we all know the value of pizza, so if you can do without a pan for one night, send along the money you would spend on that to Crawford. Without a doubt, you will be helping a worthy cause. Click on the link above under "Crawford Peace House" in this paragraph.
!
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Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle
What's wrong with her Crawford protest.
By Christopher Hitchens
Link
The most intriguing paragraph:
"There are, in fact, some principles involved here. Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don't have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive's ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders. Most presidents in time of war have made an exception in the case of the bereaved—Lincoln's letter to the mother of two dead Union soldiers (at the time, it was thought that she had lost five sons) is a famous instance—but the job there is one of comfort and reassurance, and this has already been discharged in the Sheehan case. If that stricken mother had been given an audience and had risen up to say that Lincoln had broken his past election pledges and sought a wider and more violent war with the Confederacy, his aides would have been quite right to show her the door and to tell her that she was out of order."
My beef with this administration is quite simply the compromising of our national security by conducting the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and charging it on our generations credit card. My beef is also with my fellow Generation Y partners who could care less about the War in Iraq, and worry more about when the next Grand Theft Auto game is coming out.
What inspires me about Sheehan is that when everyone sits and moans on their couches, throws popcorn at the television when a talking head for the administration comes on screen, and generally place themselves in a bubble of "war is over there, doesn't effect me over here" mentality; she stood up and took the man on. This is a president who has been secluded from opposition, advocated taking steps to weaken the constitution if not circumvented completely, spit on the very foundation of democracy by his leadership and candor as president, and played so many of us for fools.
As I've said in my posts, I don't agree with Cindy in that we should pull our troops out of Iraq, in fact I believe more must go in. I also am close to the point of advocating a draft in order to do so. As mentioned too, I can't speak for her beliefs, they are hers, so I can't answer her remarks on Israel, and nor would I try.
What I admire about her is her overall strength and determination. Her questions are genuine, she is absolutely right to demand them as Bush is right to ignore them, but she has FINALLY brought attention to the War in Iraq and turned the debate right back where it belongs. We have ignored it far too long, in most cases people act like it isn't even happening. This president needs to be held accountable for his actions, his lies, his fabrications, and overall incompetance as Commander-in-Chief. If Clinton can be impeached for a lie based on sex, Bush should be considered for impeachment for lies that have taken the lives of our fellow generation needlessly.
I'm a fan of the Real World on MTV. They are in Austin of course, which is pretty neat. One of the episodes a couple of weeks ago detailed an exchange between two of the roommates about the War in Iraq. One had even been a nurse stationed there prior to joining the show. They had one of the most ignorant exchanges about the War I had ever heard. This same ignorant exchange I have heard between many other of my fellow Gen Y partners. A general lack of caring, overall laziness on interpreting the facts, and general disinterest overcomes our generation. This war is absolutely the biggest thing that effects our future, and the future of our country. We've got to get it right, and this administration insists on continuing to get it wrong. If one mother's questions brings any attention, and hopefully some change to the path we are currently going down, it warms my heart and gives me hope. We need that right now, hope. We need to know that the world isn't as dark as it is becoming and that this administration's arrogance does not go unchecked.
I know too that If I were to be sent to Iraq, and I die, I want my mother demanding the same answers that Cindy Sheehan is asking for. My brother is on "inactive reserve" and is being flooded with mail and phone calls from the Army telling him to get physicals, make sure he is fit, get his "papers" in order, because he could be called up. If he does, I know where my mother will be; right beside Cindy Sheehan. God help the president in that case.
Forgive the extreme reaction, but when I read this, my head was spinning:
You're talking about quite possibly the greatest public intellectual over the past fifty years... A mere "talking head"? This is the man who's taken on both Ghandhi and Mother Theresa! One of the smartest writers in the world on George Orwell's legacy!
A man who's faced down a virtual excommunication from almost all his former colleagues after 9/11, and handled it with a stiff upper lip.
This is your problem, Todd -- you see everything, everything, in the prism of the Iraq war. The war, as big of a deal as it is, is simply not the be-all and end-all of the past fifty years of American life you make it out to be.
To reduce Christopher Hitchens, an intellectual giant among men, to the status of a "talking head" is a travesty beyond words.
When his pen hits paper, the world listens -- and for good reason.
Big deal. So did Maxim Magazine.
You can't hate a book with review blurbs such as "Hilariously mean", and "If there is a hell, Christopher Hitchens is going there for this book."
When we wonder why the conservatives are winning it's because they are united. Is it too high of a cost to be united in this movement in order to win? I'm not sure myself but really I support what's going on in Crawford and I believe that every day that goes by where we dont draw attention to the issues in Iraq, we are wasting precious time. When is our generation going to have, pardon my french, the balls that the 60s generation had?
They weren't always united. There was the National Review crowd, the Randians, the John Birchers... William F. Buckley fictionalizes a lot of the true divisions in the movement in those days in his new novel, "Getting it Right". (Props to the eighty-something Mr. Buckley for some of the oddest-worded love scenes in the history of prose!)
They couldn't unite, and win, until they had something solid to unite around. We haven't come to that point, yet. We still have a few more years in the wilderness to go.
Frankly, what a lot of the sixties protest generation had in balls, they lacked in brains. Some of the Vietnam antiwar protests were good and noble, but many were moderate covers for downright anti-American attitudes. The hippies were not the 'finest hour' of anything.
I think you meant "anti-America," since I don't know of many hippies against Americans (though I can name some Yippies that were anti-Amerikan).
Sometimes having anti-war protesters shot dead on college campuses can do that to a movement.
I think there was a significant portion (Probably not a majority, though it's not impossible) of the Anti-war protestors who hated not just the American government and its actions in Vietnam, but many of America's fundamental values and systems.
It was before the fall of the Soviet Union, and it was still chic in many far-leftist circles at the time to be ideologically in line with them.
Reading your first reply, I think I almost subconsciously just read 'Yippie' as 'hippie' and missed the distinction you were making.
But yeah, there's a big difference between Hippies and Yippies, and a fairly large difference between Yippies and radicals like the Weather Underground, in terms of politics and acceptable tactics.
Hey, it's history.