In an enormous outpouring of support for the war in Iraq, millions upon millions of Americans stayed in bed late, did some chores around the house and went to The Home Depot while yet more untold hundreds of thousands in Texas and Louisiana took the day off to contend with what one analyst termed, "a little weather."
The president, coincidentally observing disaster relief planning and operations from Northern Command, when asked about a rumored gathering of ne'er-do-wells around the Ellipse in DC said, "Oh, was that today? Gosh, I wanted to be there, but ya know, sometimes you just have to go to work."
A few days ago, I wrote this:
Maybe the right wing religiosos have a point. Maybe Katrina and Rita is God's way of telling us not to pay any attention to Cindy.
It turns out that the place to be in late September is where Cindy Sheehan spent August. In a Texas ditch.
Today, Glenn Reynolds links to Jeff Goldstein's dissecting of a premature and snidely reported puff piece in the Washington Post.
Typically when we hear of “thousands” protesting, we don’t expect the kind of Clintonesque legal parsing necessary to make it so; and yet that’s precisely what’s happening here, because, while “more than 2,000 people” technically qualifies as thousands, the phrase “rallied by the thousands” is suggestive of a bit more than the bare minimum at which thousands is even pluralized.
I have been watching the three cable news channels today, not to see how many people showed up to Mother Sheehan's grotesque rally, but to see how it was being reported. Know what? It wasn't. Reported, that is. It seems that there were other, more important things going on today. So we were at least spared the spectacle of over emotional radical rhetoric from leftists and supporters of terrorists.
We didn't have to see the close shots of homey looking grandmas carrying signs while out of range, some kaffiya-wearing psychopath is spewing anti-Semitic slogans as he denounces Bush as a new Hitler.
This is what passes for novel thinking among the so-called anti-war crowd. What the press either ignores, indulges or obfuscates is that, as Glenn is fond of saying, these people aren't against war, they're just on the other side.
Well, the other side is losing. And not because the war in Iraq is going so well, but because the mature minded citizens of this country realize both the stakes at risk and the bankruptcy of the "withdraw now" arguments. It is very instructive that at a time when the war effort seems at times rudderless and captainless, this bunch of Cindy sycophants can't get off the mark.
It is further worth noting that even by the hopeful projections of rally organizers, there are more Americans risking their lives in Iraq than those wasting theirs in Washington.
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