Strangechord

20,000+ at the Portland rally yesterday. Picture slide show here (taken by others).

This morning on “Meet the Press”, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “welcomed the protests as an expression of American freedoms” and said, “And it contrasts so greatly with the situation that people in Iraq find themselves in, where your tongue can be ripped out for criticizing the regime.” I find this echoes a strange logic all over the place out of those siding with Bush - it implies that if we anti-war demonstrators would only realize the freedoms we have in the U.S. and “truly” appreciate this nation, we would find no need to protest what’s going on. The accusation that these rallies are unpatriotic and that we’re all just a bunch of ungrateful, anti-American whiners is really absurd. And for folks to even dare assert that anti-war demonstrators are Saddam sympathizers shows very limited thinking.

As Brooke says in her blog today:

The attacks of 9/11 have nothing to do with Iraq. The White House has masterminded a remarkable mass brain-washing that has more than half of Americans believing all or most of the hijakers were Iraqi, despite the fact they were almost all Saudi. Not Iraqi. Not even Afghan.

I’m the last to defend that bastard, Hussein. But this war is not about Doing the Right Thing. If it were, our boys would be in Zimbabwe, Israel, and North Korea right now.

Without moral consistency, there is no high road.