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Ethel the Blog presents a hypothetical situation:

I don’t like the Cabal: I don’t like the Boy King, I don’t like Cheney, I don’t like Wolfowitz and Perle, I don’t like the GOP hacks in charge of Congress, etc. I think they’re at best a pack of self-serving crooks, cowards and liars who’ve utterly warped democracy to attain power and line the pockets of themselves and their corporate paymasters with gold. But, if an entity sprung into existence that was actually capable of invading the U.S. (there’s the huge hypothetical) and did indeed invade, I’d try my damned best to kill every last one of them, no matter how much candy or money or how many trinkets they might dangle in front of me, and no matter how much I despised whoever was in the White House. Get the point?

Jeanne D’Arc, in a very personal
post on Body and Soul, talks about why the Iraqi people are not welcoming their US “liberators” with open arms:

From the first time I heard the neoconservative dream that Iraqis would refuse to fight for Saddam and welcome American “liberators” with open arms, it seemed to me not only highly unlikely, but dehumanizing as well. As if oppressed people don’t have the same mixed-up emotions that the rest of us have. As if complex inner lives were unique to technologically advanced societies. We want to believe that there’s a small number of bad Iraqis who fight for Saddam, and an enormous number of good ones who are on our side, or will be as soon as they can break free enough to express their true emotions. After all, we’re good, right? How could they fail to see that?

While I’m sure there are some people who fall into those neat categories, I expect most Iraqis don’t know what side to be on right now. And that confusion really shouldn’t be hard for any human being to understand. Oppressor or invader — there aren’t any good choices.

All of which is directly related to an observation of mine I’ve been thinking about the past couple of days. Common wisdom has it that
us lefties (and you liberals especially) are whoollyheaded, naive dreamers, unlike those hardheaded, realistic conservatives and libertarians. So why is it that so many of the stalwards of the right were and still are so incredibly naive about this whole war?
What made them think that the Iraqi people would not fight back? I thought all these hawks were such great WWII buffs? Don’t
they know what happened when Russia was invaded, or how the Germans kept fighting for Hitler until the bitter end? More to the
point, if the Shia population of Iraq didn’t rise when Iraq attacked Iran, what makes them think they would rise for the Great Satan,
again?

Notes on the Atrocities reports on how last Thursday’s protests in Portland were treated in the local media:

In my hometown (Portland, Oregon), there was a protest last night that attracted some thousands of citizens (numbers are always vague) who were sufficiently angry enough to try to block roads and bridges. Except for a couple of skirmishes, the protesters managed to stand peacefully gathered for six or seven hours. On a day when the country has gone to war, you’d imagine that some latitude would be given for these assembling citizens.

Of course you’d be wrong: the news coverage was almost shockingly martial. When speaking to police, local TV news reporters spoke in a collegial “we,’ as in: “How are ‘we’ going to handle this situation?” The AP headline was “More than 100 arrested in Portland protest.” (As opposed to, say, “Thousands voice opposition to war.”) And in a slideshow by the Oregonian (the local paper), the photos tell na even more skewed story. Of the nine related to the Portland protest, only one shows a substantially un-editorialized picture of the anti-war protesters. Of the rest, three show them next to police in riot gear, and three more show them facing off with a tiny, quickly-evaporated group of pro-war demonstrators. The final two are un-editorialized pro-war demonstrators.

Bertram Online on children taking part in anti-war protests:

They grow up fast now, don?t they, those teens and even pre-teens. They constitute one of the fastest growing segments as consumers, what with designer clothes, mobile phones, fast food, computer games, and so forth, and so forth. They dress like adults, and are sucked into a highly sexualized universe even before their bodies are ready ? once Christina Aguilera gets to be the role model for 10-year old girls, you know something has changed. Of course, some parents voice concerns, but I don?t see the general public and the media being all that concerned. Heck, it is business, ain?t it?

In the last couple of weeks, they have also been the core group of the anti-war demonstrators. Now, that is not funny. ?Child abuse in the name of war? cries one pundit, and goes on to say that he is upset by all these innocent kids being abused and coaxed by misguided adults (probably adults who have infected by the ?pest of pacifism?, as one spectacularly stupid local politician phrases it). Which must mean that he thinks that those kids are not able to think for themselves?

Jeff Cooper at Cooped-Up riffs off one of those “newspaper discovers weblogs” articles and makes an important point:

Second, the four blogs in the original article are among the most popular in the blogosphere, with tens of thousands (and sometimes over a hundred thousand) visits per day. They’re important blogs, to be sure, but they’re not exactly representative of what blogging is these days. More typical are Cooped Up, with its 350 or so visits per day, or Planet Swank, with its 100 or so, or Jessica’s inexplicably-overlooked blog, which averages 60 or so. There are thousands upon thousands of blogs out there, some worth reading, others less so, but all part of an ongoing exchange of ideas that would not have been possible just a few years ago. Blogs encourage individual voices in ways that internet bulletin boards don?t–bulletin boards tend to be dominated by the loudest and most forceful voices, while blogs encourage a single writer to develop ideas and arguments in a more considered manner than is possible on bulletin boards, while simultaneously encouraging dialog with readers and other bloggers. Marshall, Sullivan, and Kaus represent the blogosphere’s surface; they rarely note the numerous conversations that are bubbling below them (Reynolds’s Instapundit, again, is an exception–he links to bloggers big and small). Individually, blogs like mine may not be important, but collectively I think they do make a difference in the way a small but significant portion of the population sees and thinks about the world.