Kill All Hippies

David Weigel | September 21, 2007

Code Pink protesters at the NRA's meeting today kept interrupting John McCain, so he did this:

Yep, the video comes from McCain's YouTube channel: That one guy who still works for the campaign saw the potential of it and scurried to put it up.

McCain's war stance is helping him in two ways that are only semi-related. Washington's hawkish establishment laud McCain because he's been saying for years that we needed more troops in Iraq. If the Petraeus surge works and Iraq is stabilized it knocks the rust and tarnish off the entire neoconservative project.

The base has a different reason for liking McCain on this: It wants to beat up some hippies. When he says "we beat you yesterday," he's talking as much about getting even with anti-Vietnam protesters as he is about the Senate's war votes. The Two Minutes Hate* against MoveOn.org was as much about defending the honor of David Petraeus as it was about shaming George Soros and Michael Moore and the rest of 'em. The base is actually pretty angry when it thinks about spending decades in the Middle East... but its loathing of the liberals who want to get out is visceral.

*More like Two Weeks at this point