Mullane's A "Gasser," All Right

Part of me is truly at a loss to comprehend what is perhaps the stupidest column I have ever read in a newspaper in my entire life.

And if you guessed that it was written by J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times on Sunday, then go to the head of the class.

The rally in Bristol Township against the escalation of the Iraq war was a pocket-sized protest. Only 14 people were outside the PA Action community book and clothing store on Edgely Road.

I expected a larger turnout and a younger group.

This was, after all, the day after a nervous-looking President Bush announced he would deploy an additional 20,000 soldiers to Iraq. If you are against the war, disapproval of an escalation is something worth taking to the streets, I would guess.

It's puzzling. Almost four years after the invasion, Iraq is a big war with tiny protests.

Please explain to me, J.D., how a gathering of about 100,000 people in New York City (to say nothing of hundreds of thousands more around the world) qualifies as “tiny” (the NYC protest took place in 2003, and this describes protests in 2006).

Oh, and by the way, J.D., if you want to read about more protests, check this out.

Oh, there have been some large rallies with emphatic speakers. But at the Edgely Road protest, the war's critics could not say precisely why there isn't more public protest.

Speculation was wide-ranging. There is no draft. People are too busy. Youngsters sign online petitions rather than actually march. If you protest, you risk having your patriotism questioned.

“Maybe my generation is a little lazy,” said Julia Ramsey, 25.

With so many parallels to Vietnam, the lack of alarm is alarming.

It’s actually funny in a perverse way to read these remarks from someone who cheered both for Dubya and the Iraq war as vociferously as Mullane once did, by the way.

During the 1960s, weren't young people regularly roaming about, burning draft cards and inserting daisies into Marine rifles for LIFE magazine photographers?

That's the impression I get. But I have watched way too many documentaries and films on that era.

Inevitably, the documentary begins with some sort of period pop tune, like Buffalo Bedspring (or whatever that group was called) singing, “There's something hap-pening here ... Thousand people in the street ... Singing songs and carrying signs.”

“Buffalo Bedspring”…huh, huh, huh-huh – journalism’s dog-faced boy is trying to make a joke; let’s pretend to laugh, OK?

While the song plays, there is archival footage of military helicopters landing in the jungles of South Vietnam. There are quick cuts to scenes of large anti-war crowds, replete with peace signs and twirling hippies. Groovy.

Whenever J.D. mentions the word “hippie,” by the way, that’s a cue to us that he’s about to engorge himself in the most bilious language and imagery that he can for a family newspaper.

Why can't we do at least as well with this war? I mean, the only thing more unpopular than Bush is Iraq. Some 70 percent of Americans oppose Bush's “handling” of the war, according to an AP/Ipsos poll posted last week.

Isn't that worth more than a handful of people?

“For one, people often forget that the Vietnam War, which is the classic case of war protest, took years to develop. That war was going on in the '50s. It took quite a while for disapproval to build. With this war, we are only a few years into it,” said Craig Kaufman, 33. The co-director of PA Action, he organized the rally.

“Another issue is there is no draft,” he said, “so for a lot of people the war never touches them. There are people who aren't worried about being over there, if they don't want to be over there. That makes a difference.”

So I offered a suggestion as to the puny turnouts here and elsewhere.

While disapproval of the war is wide, it is not deep. This dissatisfaction is not with war, really, but with how it is “handled,” as the AP poll question suggests.

This is truly astonishing idiocy.

I don’t know what difference it would make for the AP to phrase its polling question a little differently so as to make J.D. happy, but based on the links I provided above, it’s pretty safe to say that the disapproval of the war is “deep,” and that “depth” pertains both to the war AND how it has been “handled.”

Turn things around in Iraq and that 70 percent war disapproval number would collapse quicker than a hippie hit by tear gas.

Ugh!

God – what a vile, detestable remark!

Take a look at the photo I’ve included with this post, you moron! It’s from turkishpress.com and it shows a woman of undetermined ethnicity caught in the middle of an attack of tear gas and rubber bullets.

Does it look to you like she’s laughing, Mullane?

Does the tear gas attack look funny to you in any way?

What type of tear gas are you talking about, by the way? Pepper spray? Though noxious, at least it wouldn’t cause burns or any kind of a permanent condition. I assume that’s what you’re talking about, since other types of tear gas can be fatal (and boy, death sure is hilarious, isn’t it?).

I DARE you to make a crack like that about a Bush supporter (assuming you can even find one at this point).

Turn Iraq into a stable democracy and an ally fighting Islamic fascists, and Bush's approval ratings would leap to Clintonian levels.

Win the global war on terror, and Bush, Abu Ghraib and the torture allegations would swing from grotesque to Lincolnesque.

Anti-war protests are small because most of us are OK with waging war. Kosovo and the liberation of Kuwait were good wars, right?

We just don't like losing a war. Right now, it feels like we are losing.

I read those words of utter, mind-numbing stupidity (from “turn Iraq into a stable democracy”) and I didn’t know what else to say.

I’ll tell you what – here is Mullane’s Email address. Write to him and tell him what you think of this dreck.

Or better yet, write to Dale Larson, the publisher of this newspaper, and ask him, based on columns like this, why Mullane still has a job.