Melanie Morgan: 'You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy'

A group of pro-Bush, anti-Cindy Sheehan demonstrators set out from San Francisco last week, gathering supporters as their "You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy" caravan headed toward Crawford, Texas.

"We had over 4,000 people who came to Crawford, a good majority of them joining our caravan literally as we were coming up from Dallas," Morgan added.

"We had a very small crowd that started out in San Francisco a week ago, but as mile by mile went by, more people joined us and we had some extraordinary stories of people who were Gold Star Families who lost their sons in Iraq. Dozens of these people came to the rally and when we asked Cindy Sheehan, who had said she would meet with any parent who lost a child in Iraq, to meet with them she refused. Just another of Cindy's growing list of lies," Morgan concluded.

Family members came by the thousands - including ordinary Americans who didn't have children involved in the war - people who know that if we cut and run now, the deaths of all these young men and women will be for naught," Morgan said.

Morgan added, "We've got to remember that the reason we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is because of September 11, 2001. All the rhetoric coming out of Camp Cindy was about how there was no connection between what happened on 9/11 and what we did in Iraq.

"Try telling that to Deena Burnett, who flew to Crawford on her own dime to be with us and speak to the crowd and tell them how her husband Tom died and that his death will not go in vain because of a lack of support for the troops and our military in this mission."

Burnett's husband, Thomas E. Burnett Jr. became an American hero when on the morning of the terror attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plane on which he was a passenger was hijacked.

According to Jack Douglas of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, as many as an estimated 4,000 people attended the Crawford rally waving flags and pledging allegiance to U.S. troops last Saturday. At times, he wrote, they accused Sheehan of dishonoring the death of her son, Casey.

It was, Douglas wrote, the first time President Bush's supporters have outnumbered war protesters led by Cindy Sheehan.

Jeannine McEwin, 69, told Douglas that she and her husband, Harold, made the six-hour trip from their home on Toledo Bend Lake, a mile from the Louisiana border, to help conservatives overcome the numeric dominance that anti-war demonstrators have had in Crawford since Sheehan came to town Aug. 6.

"The left has had so much publicity, and we have sat back and done nothing," McEwin said. "We have allowed them to take over."

Her husband, Harold McEwin, 70, added that he came to support Bush and the war in Iraq. "When I was 8 years old, I walked the streets of Shreveport picking up metal coat hangers to be used to build bombs and bullets" for World War II, he said. "I started out my patriotism right there."

Douglas reported that some of those who lost children to the war wanted to enter the war-protest camps and pull up crosses bearing their children's names.

"We want to so bad we can taste it," Sandy Watson of Phoenix, whose son, Michael Williams, was killed in Iraq in 2003, told Douglas. "We don't want [Sheehan] to have our son's cross out there."

Another Bush supporter, Shawn Wroblewski of Jefferson Township, N.J., said she asked the McLennan County Sheriff's Department to look for a cross bearing the name of her son, John Thomas, a Marine killed in Iraq last year.

"Two weeks ago I called the Crawford sheriff and asked him to kindly remove my son's cross if it was there. He assured me that he would," Wroblewski told the Star-Telegram .