Cindy Sheehan Quits as Peace and Freedom Party VP Candidate

Cindy Sheehan announced she has quit the has Peace and Freedom Party presidential campaign as its VP Candidate. The Barr / Sheehan ticket itself was the shoddy result of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) trashing its own rank an file members by ignoring its own primary results, just another example of backroom sectarian anti-democratic process on the American Left.

One should question whether Cindy's action was a result of an ideological dispute with Rosanne Barr or between their "handlers." Last November, an entryist vanguard sect in the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), Revolutionary Unity (RU) founded and led by Marc Luzietti, nominated her as the SPUSA VP candidate without Cindy addressing the SPUSA convention or even contacting its leadership. I do not think she was overwhelmingly voted down because of a lack of support for her personally, but animus toward the RU that had just failed in their attempt to purge an prominent SPUSA member for running on the Green Party line for governor in New York and the RU's long history of character assassination against the SPUSA leadership. Sadly, Cindy has a long history of jumping on to wagons and having second thoughts, from Alex Jone's WTC7 dubunked conspiracy theory to her belief the the faked water burial of Osama bin Laden which she embraced without a shred of evidence. However, Cindy as shown that she has the rare strength that she can still change her mind. I hope she will continue her activism with "her own" voice without the need to be associated with anyone or any group.

The American Left deserves better than popular figures that need "handlers" and parties like the PFP that ignore the votes of their rank and file. We need an electoral coalition of all parties of the left to create a virtual party where their candidates can run against each other openly and without games. A coalition of complete equals that would allow cooperation in their mutual interest that completely prohibits entryism or any other fratricidal attempts for leftist parties to co-opt each other. The winner of such a primary would not necessarily be endorsed by the individual parties in the coalition, but all the parties would benefit from the public access provide by engaging in a formal primary process. This would only be part of a new organized left based on horizontal organizing rather than vertical organizing of the past with its need for one sect to dominate everyone else and vanguards need to overturn the decisions of majority The 2012 PFP_debacle provides an opportunity to discuss such option. The anti-grassroots PFP model has failed. let us thankfully move on.