GOOD RIDDANCE – AT 10:57 A.M. ET:  In an otherwise reasonably reported story, The Politico makes a vocabulary error that is all too frequent in the mainstream media – the use of the term "anti-war" when a bit more detail is required:

As President Barack Obama formally declared an end to combat operations in Iraq this week, the anti-war movement that helped sweep him into office — and that worked for seven years to bring U.S. troops home — finds itself struggling for survival.

There is no "anti-war" movement, any more than there was during Vietnam.  The movement in that war was an anti-draft movement, at best.  And part of it was a "movement" by the old left, which was anti any war that America had a chance of winning. 

Today's "anti-war" movement is pretty much the same.  It ignores ghastly conflicts and horrible oppression to oppose any military action by the United States. 

Several factors — war fatigue; a deep, lingering recession; and the presence of a Democratic president they helped elect — have drained the energy from organizations that led the fight against the Iraq war. Some of the most influential anti-war activist groups that once summoned half a million people to march against the Iraq war and the policies of former President George W. Bush are straining to raise the money and attention to fight what they see as Obama’s military entrenchment in Afghanistan.

Influential?  Who do they influence?

“We don’t have a very vibrant anti-war movement anymore,” lamented Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Codepink, one of the anti-war movement’s most visible organizations. “The issues have not changed very much. … Now we have a surge [in Afghanistan] that we would have been furious about under George Bush, yet it’s hard to mobilize people under Obama. We have the same anti -war movement and not the same passion.”

Code Pink is a hard-left joke.  Its leaders were recently in the Mideast, ginning up anti-Israel activism. 

We've had, for half a century, these myths about "anti-war" groups.  They did enormous damage to our effort in Vietnam – a fact confirmed in North Vietnam's official history of the war.  Ever since the so-called "McCarthy era," mainstream journalists have been reluctant to call Marxists what they really are, and so a massive distortion of reality has occurred in the press.

The story goes on to quote the laments of one Leslie Cagan, another "anti-war" activist, and founder of "United for Peace and Justice."  The left loves labels like that.  Leslie Kagan is another anti-American activist who sells herself as "anti-war."

These groups serve no useful purpose.  They surround a big lie, and, sadly, the mainstream media has gone along with the fib.

September 5, 2010