If their guy wants to bomb "wogs," then they are willing to go along.

They weren't anti-War; they were anti-Bush.

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins Refuse to Comment on Syria

Anti-War activists silenced by fear...

...of being called racist.

Another reason some Hollywood progressives have been reticent to speak out against war in Syria, according to Asner, is fear of being called racist.

"A lot of people don't want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama," he said.

What a crazy world!

The State-Run Media attacks the Vicar of Christ for opposing the Light-worker's War.

There was no anti-war movement; they were always anti-Bush.

On Friday's CBS This Morning, Mark Phillips all but hinted that Pope Francis had "taken sides" with Russia's Vladimir Putin and against President Obama in the international debate over military strikes in Syria. Phillips proposed that the Pope's letter to Putin "must have been music to the Russian president's ears."

The journalist also turned to a "Vatican historian" who once publicly attacked Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, as a "dictator", and likened him to Islamists. He also labeled the Pope's upcoming prayer and fasting vigil for peace in Syria a "religious street protest." [audio available here; video below the jump]

 Phillips led his report by noting that "popes have urged peace before. Remember, John Paul II was firmly against the Gulf War. This pope, Francis, is now actively arguing against military action against Syria. And the question is, does it matter?"

The CBS correspondent continued by outlining Pope Francis's recent actions on the Syria issue:

MARK PHILLIPS: This pope with the common touch has been uncommonly active, lobbying against an attack on Syria. He's used his last two major public appearances in St. Peter's Square to appeal to world leaders – and that primarily means President Obama – not to do it....Pope Francis has followed up his appeal by writing to Vladimir Putin as current president of the G-20. 'Armed conflicts create profound divisions and deep wounds, which require many years to heal,' he said. It must have been music to the Russian president's ears.

The Pope may be taking a moral position, in his mind, but in arguing against military action, he has entered into the world of partisan international politics. He's taken sides.

Phillips then played his clip from British author Michael Walsh. An on-screen graphic labeled Walsh a "Vatican historian", but the journalist didn't once mention that Walsh is a former Jesuit priest who maligned then-Pope Benedict XVI in the dissenting Catholic publication The Tablet in 2012:

...The present Vatican regime, despite the obviously incompetent and dysfunctional administration, is a dictatorship....Whether the Pope [Benedict XVI] is a benevolent dictator or not rather depends on one's point of view, but a dictator is what he is....And what do dictatorial regimes do when they are challenged? They lash out at all possible challengers to their power base, as we have seen across North Africa and the Middle East.

This isn't the first time the CBS correspondent has given a platform to dissenters inside the Catholic Church. On the night of Pope Francis' election, he singled out two radical feminists who were present in St. Peter's Square, and let them spout in favor of women's ordination and "LGBT issues [and] reproductive health care".

Near the end of the segment, Phillips pointed out that the pontiff has "called for a mass prayer, fast, and peace vigil for St. Peter's Square this Saturday", but then referred to it as a "religious street protest".

*Sigh*....Remember olden times when Hollywood was a bastion of hope and change and opposed war because war hurt children....it's hard to remember back as long ago as 6 years.

14 Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped

MSNBC - The Bomb Syria Now Network...

...weren't they all "Bush is a War Criminal" last month?

I Watch MSNBC So You Don’t Have To™ and I can report that it’s Crazyville over there nowadays. Viewers must find themselves waxing nostalgic for the calm and reasoned voice of Keith Olbermann. 

The other day, I saw Andrea Mitchell interview Bill Kristol on MSNBC and, if you have any memory at all, you know that Kristol was the Evil Neo-Con Liberals Hated Even More Than Karl Rove during the Bush era. This morning, I woke up early and caught the 4 a.m. replay of Rachel Maddow, and she was so rabidly pro-war you half-expected her to break out into the “Patton” monologue:

In case there was any question...

...the anti-war movement was not anti-war, it was anti-Republican.

There's been a lot of talk about the absence of a strong and visible anti-war movement, the way there was during the George W. Bush Presidency. While there are protests against intervention in Syria, in general the movement seems to be a lot weaker under Obama. If you guessed that this had something to do with the fact that Obama is a Democrat, you'd be correct!

In 2011, Professors Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas published a study titled: The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization Of The Antiwar Movement In The United States 2007-2009 which looked at nearly 6,000 surveys of anti-war demonstrators between January 2007 and December 2009. This one chart basically tells the whole story. The percentage of Democrats attending anti-war protests collapsed at the end of 2008, and in early 2009.

Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas

As Democrats are the biggest block of any of these groups, this desertion of the Democratic party was the major blow.

Just so long as they know their priorities.

Well, that's ironic.

John Yoo - villified by the Left for authoring the "torture memo" - notes that the Leftists critics of Bush are strangely silent about Obama:

The Obama administration’s use of executive power has gone further than the Bush administration’s toward diminishing Americans’ civil liberties, author John Yoo told The Daily Caller.

“Somehow the Obama administration has increased the protections for terrorists, while at the same time reducing them for the rest of us law-abiding citizens in the United States,” Yoo said after a panel discussion on his new book “Taming Globalization” at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Yoo was deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Bush administration. During his tenure, he authored what came to be derided as the “torture memos,” which defined what techniques were acceptable to use during interrogations of terrorist suspects.

Anti-war organizations branded him and many others in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself, as “war criminals.”

Yoo said the anti-war movement has not criticized President Barack Obama, despite his administration’s formalization of a process for “targeted killing[s]” of American citizens without trial.

“You don’t see the same critics who so thrashed President Bush, for allegedly thinking he was a king, making the same arguments and engaging in the same criticism of President Obama,” Yoo told TheDC.

“I think a reasonable person can only conclude that is because President Obama happens to be a Democrat, where as President Bush was a Republican.”

It's not that the Left is anti-war; it's that the left is anti-war on anyone but the real enemy, Republicans.

Here's a video of Yoo's comments:

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...such as the fact that the President ordered a Tomahawk missile attack on civilians and is personally involved in jailing a journalist who reported on the attack.

Glen Greenwald seems to be the only leftist interested in what the Noble Peace Prize winner is doing:

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation‘s national security correspondent, is easily one of America’s best and most intrepid journalists. He spends his time in dangerous places in order to uncover what the U.S. Government is doing around the world. He often produces vital scoops that, during the Obama presidency, are — for reasons often recounted here — largely ignored by the American establishment media and both political parties. In July of last year, he returned from Mogadishu and documented the Obama administration’s maintenance and proxy operation of secret CIA-run prisons in Somalia of the type that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration and which Obama supporters like to claim the President ended, and last month he returned from tribal regions in Yemen and detailed how U.S. civilian-killing drone strikes (along with its support for Yemeni despots) are the single most important cause fueling Al Qaeda’s growth in that country. But his newest article – describing President Obama’s personal, direct role in ensuring the ongoing imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist – may be his most important one yet; even for those inured to the abuses of the Obama administration, it’s nothing short of infuriating.

And:

Despite that important journalism — or, more accurately, because of it — Shaye is now in prison, thanks largely to President Obama himself. For the past two years, Shaye has been arrested, beaten, and held in solitary confinement by the security forces of Saleh, America’s obedient tyrant. In January, 2011, he was convicted in a Yemeni court of terrorism-related charges — alleging that he was not a reporter covering Al Qaeda but a mouthpiece for it — in a proceeding widely condemned by human rights groups around the world. “There are strong indications that the charges against [Shaye] are trumped up and that he has been jailed solely for daring to speak out about US collaboration in a cluster munitions attack which took place in Yemen,” Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, told Scahill. The Yemen expert, Johnsen, added: “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job.”

Shaye’s real crime is that he reported facts that the U.S. government and its Yemeni client regime wanted suppressed. But while the imprisonment of this journalist was ignored in the U.S, it became a significant controversy in Yemen. Numerous Yemeni tribal leaders, sheiks and activist groups agitated for his release, and in response, President Saleh, as the Yemeni press reported, had a pardon drawn up for him and was ready to sign it. That came to a halt when President Obama intervened. According to the White House’s own summary of Obama’s February 3, 2011, call with Saleh, “President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai.” The administration has repeatedly refused to present any evidence that Shaye is anything other than a reporter, and this is what State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told Scahill in response to his story...

Via Mark Shea.

What would we do without academics

Did Obama's election kill the antiwar movement?

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Since 2003, the antiwar movement in the United States has had much to protest with Americans fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya, but the movement—which has dropped off sharply the past two years—may be more anti-Republican than antiwar, says a University of Michigan researcher.


A new study by U-M's Michael Heaney and colleague Fabio Rojas of Indiana University shows that the antiwar movement in the United States demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, first with Congress in 2006 and then with the presidency in 2008.

"As president, Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan," said Heaney, U-M assistant professor of organizational studies and political science. "The antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama's 'betrayal' and reinvigorated its protest activity.

"Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated. The election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the antiwar movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions."

Heaney and Rojas analyzed the demobilization of the antiwar movement by using surveys of 5,400 demonstrators at 27 protests mostly in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago and San Francisco from January 2007 to December 2009. The surveys asked questions on basic demographics, partisan affiliations, organizational affiliations, reasons for attending the events, histories of political participation, and attitudes toward the movement, war and the political system.

In addition, the researchers observed smaller, more informal events at which antiwar activists gathered, including Capitol Hill lobby days, candlelight vigils, fundraisers, small protests, planning meetings, training sessions, parties, the National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice and the U.S. Social Forum. They also interviewed 40 antiwar leaders about their personal backgrounds, the inner workings of the antiwar movement, political leaders and the Democratic Party.

Their study found that the withdrawal of Democratic activists changed the character of the antiwar movement by undermining broad coalitions in the movement and encouraging the formation of smaller, more radical coalitions.

After Obama's election as president, Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009, Heaney and Rojas say. In contrast, members of third parties became proportionately more prevalent in the movement, rising from 16 percent in January 2009 to a high of 34 percent in November 2009.

So, all that stuff going on when Bush was in office wasn't about the war, it was about Republicans winning the war?

Next up - researchers discover that the news isn't as bad when a Democrat is in office.