Geezer Nostalgia

Loose Canon sometimes wishes she lived next door to one of those annoying families with a "War Is Not the Answer" sign--just so LC could have a sign that said, "It Depends on the Question."

Unfortunately, there are circumstances in which war is the answer. Oddly enough, some of the protesters here in Washington over the weekend know this-they are, as Christopher Hitchens describes them "phony peaceniks."

Washington Post reporter Michael Janofsky described one of the sponsoring groups as embracing a "wide range of progressive political causes." Here's Hitchens on what actually turns out to be a narrow but very radical range:

"I suppose that it is possible that [Janofsky] has never before come across 'International ANSWER,' the group run by the 'Worker's World' party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the 'resistance' in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a 'wide range of progressive political objectives' indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper-to mention only two radical left journalists-who have exposed 'International ANSWER' as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism."

So you see, for the left, war is sometimes the answer.

National Review's Byron York captured the sheer zaniness of the gathering:

"Katrina wasn't even the only weather phenomenon used to criticize George W. Bush. When Georgia Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney spoke to the crowd, she began by declaring that 'a cruel wind blows across America.' By that, she meant not a hurricane, but a wind that began 'in Texas and Montana' - an apparent reference to George W. Bush's home state of Texas and Dick Cheney's home state of...well, his home state is Wyoming, but McKinney was fairly close. The cruel wind, McKinney explained, blew across the American heartland all the way to Washington, D.C. And then, 'This cruel wind blew disenfranchisement into Florida and Ohio' and 'the American people were forced to endure fraud in the elections of 2000 and 2004.' The crowd loved it."

I suspect the protests were an occasion for geezer nostalgia for many. That seems to be what it was for Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who penned a piece headlined, "Stop, Children, What's that Sound?"

"Saturday had that vintage feeling. Cindy Sheehan was there to play her iconic earth-mother role, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presence somehow made the whole thing official. In the crowd there were next-generation merry pranksters bearing caricature puppets, legions of praying Buddhists, ranks of earnest Presbyterians for Peace and files of silver-haired Raging Grannies. There were countless young adults whose baby boomer parents had marched these same streets in protest over three decades ago. All that was missing was the sour tinge of tear gas in the air."

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