Like most people, I'm loving the Cindy Sheehan story mainly because she's got the President by the short hairs and as we all know, I love nothing more than when something comes along that wipes the smirk off the President's face. As I was flipping through the channels, I stumbled upon Fox News in full "to the Bat Cave" mode and doing a hatchet job on the poor lady. It seems that the talking points for the attack are not about her anymore, but on the company she's keeping. Because she's doing something anti-war, she's got a lot of the anti-war people behind her, including Michael Moore and MoveOn.org. Knowing that nothing scares the beejesus out of Fox news watchers, they couldn't help but drop the names of all those anti-war folks as much as possible. One total humor-less editor for some right-wing newspaper, one of those bitter young folks who turn Republican due to an inability to have women talk to them up until their mid-twenties, was on reciting the litany of supposed offenses the anti-war movement commit on a regular basis ("they don't like war!" They have tattoos! They look funny!). During another interivew with an actual Democrat, one of the Fox News anchor people was almost beside himself that somebody would have the temerity to question the President and mentioned Michael Moore every fifth word.

The thing about it, though, is that they have a point. If I were advising Mrs. Sheehan, I'd tell her to stay as far away from possible as the anti-war people as possible. And don't even think about blogging on Michael Moore's web site. Why? Because when it comes down to it, the anti-war movement people are probably their own worst enemy. When people look at them, in all their dreadlocked glory, I'm pretty sure the average American immediately dismisses them as nothing but a bunch of loonies. In fact, somewhere I read an article recently (I tried looking for it but I couldn't find it) that pointed out that polling is showing that whenever there's a lot of protests going on, support for the war increases. When there's no protests, polls drop in support of the war. The reason? Because if your average normal person had a choice of who to support, they'll go to the dumb guy who talks funny as opposed to the dumb guy who looks funny.

Which, actually, is what I'm thinking about the war. I don't support it and kind of anti-war about it, it's just that I don't really support the anti-war movement. In fact, I think if you were to create a line and put "sane response" in the center and anti-war people on one side and war supporters on the other side, I'm thinking that the war supporters would probably be closer to "sane response" than the anti-war supporters. Not that either would be close to the center, but still. I think I wrote elsewhere that I was behind the "Ambivelant About the War" movement and wished we could organize protests and rallies in support of not exactly knowing what to think. Or, I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm sure as hell not going to support the President on Iraq, but I'm sure as hell not going to be marching in the streets.

Well, and for what it's worth, as bad as the war is, leaving Iraq right now would be even worse than staying. Bush just got us in a terrible, horrible jam and someday, one can only hope karma gets her bitch on.