A great post from Rick Moran, asking a very pertinent question: if Cindy Sheehan really is the catalyst for a newly energized “anti-war” movement that’s sweeping the nation, then where are all the protesters?

It took a little digging, but I was able to discover that there are less than 200 people camping out with Mother Sheehan in Crawford with perhaps another 1,500 people in and around the town on any given day. While the number of campers is kept low due to space limitations, that 1,500 number appears to be pretty solid. And not all of those people are there for the protest. Many are connected with the so-called “Crawford Peace House” whose anti-semitic activities have been well documented elsewhere.

The other night, folk singer and legendary anti-war activist Joan Baez drew around 200 people to a free concert near the camp site. Also, this blogger took the trouble to add up names from three Guest Books which had been placed around Camp Casey and discovered 750 signatures – not from one day but from more than 2 weeks of protests.

It’s like this “mass movement” exists only on a Hollywood sound stage. When the cameras are turned off, it disappears like smoke from a fog machine wafting up into the rafters. It’s bogus. It’s a lie. It’s one gigantic photo-op staged for the benefit of the press whose seeming indifference to some of the truly kooky things Sheehan has said (not to mention the nauseating anti-semitic rants of Mother Sheehan and her supporters) is almost beyond comprehension.

Cindy Sheehan is not Rosa Parks. She’s Carrie Underwood, the completely made for TV “star” that Fox created out of whole cloth on their show American Idol. Cindy Sheehan has been manufactured. Piece by counterfeit piece, the legend of Mother Sheehan has been built from scratch. What started out as some left wing nut of a mother and her genuine grief at the loss of her son being shamelessly used by the hard, anti-war left to raise their pitiful profile has now morphed into a media event complete with PR flaks, political advisers, and media gurus who have turned her Quixote like protest into the signature image of a movement with nothing and nobody behind it.