"Huge" DC Anti-War Protest Fizzles

We suspected, when penning last week's post on Hanoi Jane and her increasingly geriatric Boomer 5th Columnist pals, that last Saturday's big "anti-war rally" on the Mall would be somewhat less than impressive, in spite of the predicted turn out of "over 100,000" communists, er, anti-war protestors, or maybe, "billions and billions" of them, jokes Redstate. Scott Ott, HazZzMat's favorite satirist, opined in one of his famous "fake but accurate" newsbriefs:

“The speaker roster reminds me of the old Hollywood Squares game show,” said one unnamed staffer of Vegan Lesbians for Racial and Nuclear Justice, whose dozens of members will cross the continent to join the rally today. “I mean Fonda, Sarandon, Glover and Jackson might as well be Charo, Joan Rivers, George Gobel and Paul Lynde. How am I going get my group excited about geopolitical and military strategy with these has beens leading the way?”

Like the propagandists they are, the hard leftists rather dramatically over-estimated (as usual) the pulling power of their patented brand of 24/7 anti-Americanism. They've gotten suddenly mush-mouthed about actual turnout, and some estimates put it at less than 30,000. The MSM did its usual to help out by using tight shots in its photo and TV coverage, a tried and true old trick to make a demo seem larger. And CBS' venerable Bob Schieffer even bought into the propaganda without investigating it, which is apparently becoming a new CBS custom.

Power Line, which provided the tip on Scott's story, also duly noted that the MSM ignored a real protest with a far greater turnout that occurred on the Mall last week, the annual Right to Life protest.

Power Line also provided an antidote to the left's congenital liars by posting a measured but powerful eyewitness account that appeared in its forum section. The whole thing is well worth reading, but a couple of passages are particularly worth repeating here. First of all, this commentator notes quite prominently the tendency of the anti-war zealots to rely on easy sloganeering rather than empirical reasoning—what HazZzMat regards as the infantilism of the left:

Chants and slogans work well with this crowd. Serious debate does not. That’s the problem.

This commentator also points out the left's tendency to develop false opposites. Like you should have "justice" instead of "war." Well, yeah, you should, theoretically. (After all, Pol Pot was a nice guy, theoretically, right.?) But what if the other side starts flying planes into your office buildings? You're supposed to send lawyers after these clowns? Leave it to our favorite narcissistic camera hog to illustrate the point even better:

My favorite was when Jesse Jackson stated that “roads and bridges” were not being built due to the war. The crowd cheered.

After agreeing with our observations that the crowd was actually quite small, he also observes that the use of obscenity was overwhelming and the hatred of Bush pretty much trumped everything else:

It is quite astonishing to experience the depth to which this sentiment pervades the entire message of the crowd, and it is clearly a meme that overwhelms all reason or debate.

Indeed, and also makes it exceptionally easy for the stupid to participate in the party. Hand in hand with this, the commentator also notes the largely predictable composition of the crowd, although we're saving one component for last:

-Hippies. Yup, the Woodstock crowd is hanging on.
-College students. If you’re not liberal when you are young, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not conservative when you are old, you don’t have a brain.
-Alternative lifestylists. They are linking their cause with the anti-war crowd, as has always been true.

The final component disturbs this writer, however, as it does us:

-The Privileged Middle Class. This is the group that concerns me. There were a striking number of couples in their 40s, obviously wealthy, and with their kids. These are the new Europeans. Having never sacrificed anything of import, having never struggled to succeed, they have taken on the idea that America is the great evil in the world. They don’t see that fighting for freedom is the thing that enabled their prosperity. Nothing is sadder than a family that throws its “No Blood for Oil” banner in the trash on its way to the parked Escalade.

This is a devastating but accurate observation, and the writer is to be commended for stating it so succinctly.

We've often observed here that we've never met an impoverished leftist, at least in this country. As in the Vietnam protests, the ones doing most of the ranting actually have the least skin in the game. And, obviously, the most time on their hands. Despicable. But what do you expect from the Idiotarian left, an inertial force surviving from the 1960s that keeps pushing, as if on autopilot, an obsolete Marxist solution to everything in the universe in spite of the fact that no one any longer remembers what it is.