Sink the Pink

David Weigel | September 28, 2007

We're wrapping up a month when the Democrats lost every major war vote and publicly denounced MoveOn.org, making it all the weirder when Kathryn Jean Lopez links this Code Pink ad and says they "own the Dems."

This seems, to me, the exact wrong lesson to draw from the cartoon. The real lesson: Code Pink is a confederacy of dingbats.* They're trying to portray how their activism will move "the Democrats" and they show Joe Lieberman turning into Andy Bacevich when a Pink lady jumps on his back. That's just fantastically stupid. Lieberman became, if anything, more hawkish when left-wing and anti-war activists skunked him in the 2006 Democratic Party and he won re-election as an independent.

For a number of reasons there's never been a real "anti-war movement" against Operation Iraqi Freedom Etc. There have been some great anti-war journalists and some earnest activists like Adam Kokesh and then there have been all-purpose protesters like Medea Benjamin for whom the Iraq War is more fun to protest than the WTO meetings they used to protest. The lack of influence that these groups have on either political party is predictable, but interesting in a seven-car-pile-up sort of way.

*There's some pushback in the comments about this word. For "dingbats," read "women who wear pink crowns and shout things during committee hearings."