Listening to all the ... overheated rage about pacifists on and off college campuses, you'd think as well that there was a large and serious antiwar movement afoot to rival that of the Vietnam 60's. Reality check: polls show that 94 percent of Americans support the war effort, with even a supposed bastion of leftism like the Harvard student body proving pro-war by more than two to one.
That the right can whip itself into a rage about an American left so small and marginalized suggests that it, too, is unhinged by fear, and can only displace it by a knee-jerk refighting of yesterday's cold war culture wars. Some conservatives are so eager to manufacture traitors that they have yet to recognize that, post-Sept. 11, the leaders of the Democratic Party, Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt (not to mention Al Gore), have been more fiercely loyal to the administration's war policy than the Republicans busy accusing Colin Powell of appeasement of Saddam.
The truth is that the country is as united as it ever could be, and willing to follow the president wherever he leads.
[See http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/opinion/13RICH.html]
Carl
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