Steven McGraw wrote:
>Not to give too much credit to horowitz, who is merely repeating what
>leftists already know, but I have been wondering about this myself. If
>they're as eager to smear the protesters as everyone seems to think, why
>aren't the networks and major papers making a bigger deal out of the
>leadership and their creepy politics? Could it be laziness? Bias? Honest
>stupidity?
-Several possibilities: there's a lot of sympathy for an antiwar
-position among the elite (see the NYT editorial from the other day
-for a sample); despite the best efforts of David Corn, the mainstream
-doesn't know who's behind ANSWER; redbaiting doesn't have much effect
-these days outside the far right (and part of the left); it just
-wouldn't be credible to paint all those Kansas grandmas for peace as
-the stooges of Pynongyang.
I would actually argue (and believe it since it's one reason I've been so vocal) that the whole discussion on the Left itself insulates the charge, since most of the left criticizing ANSWER and WWP also supports the antiwar position. That "puppets" are trashing the puppet-master makes it hard for rightwing attacks to stick. It also has made the "commie charge" old news-- it's a basic rule of politics that its better for your own side to dump the bad news yourself than let the opposition bring it out. When David Horowitz makes the charge, all the lefties at the march can shrug and say, hey Corn wrote about that last month in the Nation-- where's the news value?
The reality is the reality that reporters know about-- nasty types are doing a lot of the organizing, a lot of those organized don't like the politics of the organizers, but the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating are therefore doing so for their own reasons. They can't be dupes when the whole ANSWER issue is so widely discussed.
-- Nathan Newman