So that's where the freedom babes ended up…

Remember the Freedom Babes? Those sun-nuzzled honeys with Cedars of Lebanon painted on their cheeks, who hogged the cameras at Martyr's Square and put a surge of hope (warblogging might help me score chicks?) into the pants of desktop warriors everywhere? The anti-Syrian freedom foxes even created a vogue for the theory that "beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends" (which would be news to anybody who was on the internet before about 1999). It turns out they're also on the cutting edge of some very old social trends. Yahoo News takes you to a protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York:

Democracy-whiskey-sexy diehards, never known for their gallantry, will object that these two ain't all that. (A lie: The one on the left is at least as presentable as any of the girls of March.) The picture also has the signs of being one of those dozen-people-crowded into-a-narrow-frame setups that for the past three years have been used to make pathetically small "pro-Bush" rallies look slightly less unimpressive. But maybe it's time to reconsider the Freedom Babe theory of forward progress. (Even at the height of the fever I'd have traded all these coozes for one old man with electrical-tape eyebrows.) The French army may not be very good at fighting wars, but when they executed Mata Hari (whose incredible life story is always worth reading), they understood something no warblogger ever figured out: Don't put your trust in a pretty face.