Cindy Sheehan to Install Anti-Obama Camp at Washington Monument

Looking back at the aughts, who can forget indelible images of a war and a president that should never have been, and the makeshift camp set up outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch at Crawford Texas that challenged them both.

For those feeling nostalgic about the past decade, fret not: It's apparently not going away.

Energizer Bunny war protester Cindy Sheehan, who last year ran for Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco congressional seat, plans to set up a new anti-war camp near the Washington Monument to protest ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It's true," Sheehan said in an e-mail, adding that she couldn't discuss her plans until after our deadline. .

In 2005, during George W. Bush's five week vacation at Prarie Chapel Ranch near Crawford, Texas, Sheehan pitched a tent by the side of the road near the ranch's entrance demanding an audience with the president at which she would ask questions about the Iraq war, where her son Casey was killed.

She then rode a wave of fame to become the country's most prominent war protester. In 2008 Sheehan campaigned to unseat Nancy Pelosi. The House of Representatives Speaker had not moved to impeach President Bush, Sheehan said.

Now she's announced she will establish a Washington D.C. based tent village like the one she built at Crawford.

Angered by President Barack Obama's war-justifying Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Sheehan said she will re-establish Camp Casey near the Washington Monument, setting up tents, and demanding that her anti-war message be heard.

"At first I believed that the Republicans were the war party, but it became increasingly clear to me that it doesn't matter what party a president is -- the policies of war continue on," Sheehan told the Fort Worth Star Telegram, for a Dec. 20 story. "He should devise a plan for troop withdrawal that is as speedy as safely possible and combine economic growth and democracy building in our occupied countries with a speedy withdrawal. No occupations will save billions of dollars a month and maybe our economy could start to improve, too."

Most of the land around the Monument is Federal Property.

I doubt she will be able to get a permit for Tents on the Mall or anywhere near the Memorials there .

Washington DC isnt like Crwford Tex. where you can set up a tent on the side of the road with or without a landowners permission.The park service is responsible for the mall, she would ahve to have certain minimal standards of sanitation and rent toilets. If she got the permit.

Her best chance would be to mingle in with the usual bums and homeless there and sleep on one of the steam vents along Constitution Ave. like they do. The police tend to look the other way on them, but Cindy seeks attention and I doubt they would let her sleep there either.

The best way to handle Cindy would be to arrest her for Tresspass and have her sleep 30 days in the DC jail.
That might cure her dreams of a Martin Luther King style campout on the Mall.

We could have 1M people living in the streets of the Capitol and the media would ignore it. If forced, they could and would frame the shots to show 10 bedraggled people and some signs that could be construed negatively against them.

However, I have thought for a long time that we need just that sort of demonstration: 1M people actually living out on the streets for as long as it takes. The Czechs and Poles, the Ukrainians and Georgians all did that. Some of these Velvet Revolutions worked better than others, of course and in the case of the Eastern Europeans, the unions were on the side of freedom.

In the early 1990s, during the Second Soviet Revolution. we had C-band sat TV. Back then, the network feeds were wild and we spent days watching Russian working men calmly building barricades with cars and walking around with squat bottles that used to contain vodka, filled with a yellowish fluid with rags stuffed in their necks. What struck me was how utterly business-like, organized and competent these men were. They knew what to do, how to do it and were working together calmly and efficiently. No matter when I watched this, I never saw a policeman or saw these men being stopped from any of what they were doing. I was proud of them for fighting tyranny. Of course, I had and have no idea of what was really happening as it was all silent footage. They could have been Gorby’s Goons, I just don’t know.

Most Americans haven’t yet suffered enough to just take to the streets. We are just now getting the structure together and we are middle class, so we do things differently. The left, when it does this, uses college age kids and then they attract all the other anarchists, other single-issue folks and paid NGO members. It turns into a party and most of them know of warm safe houses where they can take a break or a shower and sleep without fear. We have a lot of older and middle-aged folks, many with small children. It is still something our demographic will not do..............yet.

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