First Footnote to the preceding

According to a recent poll for The Hill, people are more than restive about Libya, Afghanistan, and the rest, they are fed up.

An overwhelming number of voters believe the United States is involved in too many foreign conflicts and should pull back its troops....

Seventy-two percent of those polled said the United States is fighting in too many places, with only 16 percent saying the current level of engagement represented an appropriate level.

Beyond that, people are questioning the value of the two "big" wars. Some 54% of those polled say that the war in Afghanistan has either made no difference to US national security or actually has increased the danger of terrorism. Sixty percent feel the same way about Iraq.

Public opposition is strong enough that

[t]he U.S. Conference of Mayors approved a resolution on Monday calling for an accelerated end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

the first time such a resolution had been passed since 1971.

Now we'll get to see if either the GOPpers or the Dims actually believe in that "listening to the voice of the people" crap they keep spouting.

And by the way, this also shows why we need a movement that is on the streets, that is less focused on being "respectable" and more focused on being visible: An issue like this has to be pushed toward the top of the national agenda if it is to be moved and it won't get to that point if it remains a matter of private (even if mass) opinion rather than public presence.

Because of national news blackouts as the herd brain of the mainstream mass media gets hypnotized by the shiny new penny of the tea partiers and corporate publishers make clear their preferences in what gets covered, that visibility may be more local or regional than national, but that makes it no less important: Legislators, after all, are elected locally, not nationally.

Footnote to the Footnote: For anyone who might want to argue that it was unfair of me to combine "made things worse" and "made no difference" to get the majorities I described above and that I could also have gotten majorities by combining "made things better" and "made no difference," I would reply that since both wars were predicated on arguments about US security and so the supposed point of each was to make things better, saying they "made no difference," which of necessity means that the money spent and lives lost or damaged were a waste, amounts to a rejection if not a condemnation of those wars and cannot be read as expressing any sort of support and so cannot be combined with "made things better."