Crossing a line

Updated I have railed often enough against the failure of the antiwar movement in this country to be more aggressive, more assertive, more on-the-streets and less concerned with being seen as "serious" and oh-so respectable commenters on national policy. Yes, the Big Name Bloggers use the terms to mock the upholders of the status quo - but they are not ridiculing being "serious," only who is seen as being such.

For my part, however, I have insisted that what the movement really needs is not more negotiations with Nancy Pelosi or a filibuster-a-thon from Harry Reid, but

tens of thousands of pissed-off Americans in the streets screaming “Out Now! Out Now! Out NOW!”

Screaming it, I've said, until getting out of Iraq in three months or four months is the "safe," the "compromise" position.

Well, to celebrate this, my 3,001 post, the turn of the odometer so to speak, I thought I'd offer two clips of the August 11 demonstration outside "The Big" Dick Cheney's home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, involving a decent number of joyfully pissed-off Americans.



A longer one:



Footnote: Reuters reported a few days ago that

[t]he New York Police Department must release undercover police reports on protester activity planned for the 2004 Republican National Convention....

The ruling came in response to two lawsuits filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union for protesters. ...

The police department argued the arrests were justified due to information gleaned from a surveillance operation by undercover officers who attended protester meetings before the convention, but have not released the details. ...

In response to the ruling, NYCLU lawyer Chris Dunn called the police surveillance of political activity "troubling."

Keeping up the pressure on all fronts is what will work. By no means do I reject lobbying, voting, legal work, any of it. It's rather that I embrace the joyfully raucous power of on-going public protest - protest that is the mortar of a movement's structure, firming the foundation for every other effort - and want to see much more of it.

Updated with Another Footnote: I want to thank the right-wing nutsoid whose link to this post was labeled "another moonbat ranting" for the attention.

Overall quite a place he's got there. (I assume "he" because the pseudonym is of a male.) There were 10 posts up on the homepage, nine of which were about politics or political issues. (The other was about the opening of the musical comedy version of "Young Frankenstein.") Over the course of those nine posts, he calls Ann Coulter "profound" and "a genius," calls both Charles Krauthammer and Robert Novak "great," and says, apparently seriously, that "The Big" Dick Cheney is "a statesman, a leader of enormous integrity, [who] would make an excellent President."

On the other hand, Michael Moore "is a socialist." (Hey, bozo, buy a clue: I'm a socialist. Michael Moore? No way.) Markos Moulitsas is "a demagogue, a socialist, and ... a threat to the basic American freedoms" while DailyKos is the "loony left, the hard core of the crazies." (And here I've been griping about how centrist Markos strives to be.) Cindy Sheehan is a "madwoman," Jack Murtha is "despicable" and "a national embarrassment," The New Yorker and the New York Times are part of "the Treason Lobby," Max Cleland lost his limbs as a result "only of his own clumsiness" because he "dropped the grenade on himself ... after stopping for a beer," and the Democratic candidates for president are "shrill," angry, "monotonous and unattractive." (Well, okay, if "unattractive" means "unappealing," for the most part I'll concede the last two words.)

Remember, all this was in the space of the most recent nine politics-related posts. I kept thinking this has to be a spoof, but found no evidence of it. In that context, being called a "moonbat" is positively complimentary.

But what was really revealing about his audience is that at one point he linked to something Novak had written, urging people to "read Bob’s whole article, it’s not long." (Yes, emphasis added.)

Still struggling with that attention-span thing, hey, kids?

Oh, and for any rightie wackos want to gripe about me not including a link back to his site: Cry me a river.