ANTI-WAR PROTESTS….The warhawks are in full-court mockery mode over the anti-war protests. As Tom Spencer puts it:
You sure can tell the pro-war folks are getting a bit desperate, aren’t they?
And Kieran Healy suggests that conservatives ought to be a little more trusting of all those people who, under other circumstances, make the free market tick:
But this hasn’t been their reaction. Instead, it’s made many of them retreat into a more atavistic, essentially pre-modern form of conservativism. The kind that regards the people as ignorant dupes who don’t know what’s good for them. The kind that’s contemptuous of the masses and snickers at their poorly-articulated convictions. The kind that, when faced with popular dissent, assumes that the dissenters must ipso facto not truly be Of The People. The kind, in other words, usually associated with the dogmatic worst of the Left they claim to reject.
Atrios has this report from Philly:
Despite all the attempts at mischaracterization, the crowd was a pretty representative cross-section of the public. Some union groups, some church groups – catholics, quakers, unitarians, some college students, some little old ladies, a small number of trustifarian types, and a lot of middle aged couples. Black, White, people of Asian descent, Latinos, the whole shebang. The signs were almost entirely on message – I saw almost no one trying to use the march for the usual assortment of lefty causes. Police seemed cooperative and everything was quite peaceful.
And I for one would like to thank the protesters. Even though I support the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein, this kind of thing should never be done without plenty of protest. It will probably still happen, but before it does the Bush administration should know that they’ve been in a dogfight with the UN, NATO, “old Europe,” the voters of the United States, and anyone else who loves democracy but nonetheless has a bone to pick with our foreign policy.
Maybe we need to do it, but it shouldn’t be easy.
