Quite the contrary, people like Yoshie and myself not only understand precisely this (with the minor qualification that the most ardent Kerry supporters are the 'antiwar movement', but not all Kerry supporters are particularly antiwar - see how crude, unnuanced and 'rigid' I am?) , but unlike you, further understands this to be a PROBLEM. Why? Because Kerry fucking SUPPORTS everything his antiwar supporters oppose! Kerry has quite publically endorsed many tenets of Bushism: preemptive war, Israel, get Chavez, etc. Must we reiterate the list ad nauseam?
So the antiwar left is either deeply cynical (like Doug?) or, more likely, very naive. In either case they end up in the same All American ideological cesspool with the Far Right Chimp Lovers: "We Support Our Oppressors!" who hate our guts and want to kill us. Or draft us.
On Oct 7, 2004, at 1:20 PM, Thomas Seay wrote:
> The antiwar movement has not collapsed.
If they're nowhere to be seen, then they've collapsed. Opinion kept private don't mean a thing.
> More and more
> people are against this war,
I think the consistently proven Bush residual support of ~ 40-45%, which hasn't been broken, shows that mass antiwar sentiment, public or private, has reached its peak at present. There's really been no further movement since the April events in Iraq. Since then antiwar opinion has been content to let Iraqi resistence carry the whole burden of the "antiwar movement".
>but they obviously dont
> see the value in attending these demonstrations.
I think this imparts too much wisdom to the antiwar mass. Instead their leaders have decided to capitualte to the Democrats. "They" confounds leaders with mass.
> Without an attractive alternative, they will restrict
> their protest to talking shit about Bush and voting
> against him in November.
People with rigid categories in their minds often do not see that movements often tend to shift shape and metamorphose into strange forms under the changing circumstances, and then, when those circumstances change (for example, after an election), metamorphose back again, or perhaps to something yet more different -----------------
And all this amorphous "shape-shifting" around such a "rigid" date (Nov. 3rd), too! "Flaccidity meets Rigidity" on Election Day. But don't go confusing the flaccid with the feminine. Nothing feminine about it.
(Yawn) people ought to see how much they are putting all their chips on what is going to happen post election. Boy, right now I'm expecting a huge explosion of publically visible mass actions against the warmonger President Kerry! And don't even mention the "transistion", much less talk of a "Kerry honeymoon"!
Translation: Just can't wait for the next batch of lameass excuses from the US Left, post election. Newman might as well get started on them right now - I can help, because I can already guess some of them. ---- -Brad