RESPONSE TO MARISSAGATE

Reader JA finds some points of disagreement to Ms Mika's Jerry McGuire Moment:

...public opinion is a very fickle thing, and very much influenced by the press. A lot of people base their decisions on information from CNN, and a lot of people will blindly follow the president whatever he does, i think this is a point a lot of people haven't mentioned. A simple fact: the more widespread mass demonstrations there are, the more media coverage. Especially when these protesters are regular people, not just peace loving hippies, the average dumbass american sees the antiwar stance as more valid, more close to home. It encourages people to doubt their own assumptions and perhaps think about what is really going on. Marissa is only considering berkeley, where the anti war movement (made up primarily of hippies) has been terribly sad anyway. The rest of the country (and world) is not like here. Even at the SF protests there were many normal people.

Nowhere is the point about regular people more apparent than it was this past sunday during the global vigil.


(from my adjacent-to-hometown of Burlingame CA)

I stood among about 1000 people in downtown Santa Barbara on a cool, windy night. They were families, yuppies, baby boomers, professionals, all kinds of people. They were not, by appearance or otherwise, the "hippies" of the campus antiwar movement, in Berkeley, Santa Barbara or otherwise. A thousand regular people lining a couple of city blocks, softly singing "Give Peace a Chance", "This Little Light of Mine" and "We Shall Overcome". The same is true of the big marches in SF, DC, LA, NY and elsewhere. A great proportion of the protesters are the so-caled regular people of the country, people who'd be rather unlikely to, say, join A.N.S.W.E.R..

Also, media recognition of protests is very important. Example: Monday evening on CNN, anchors Judy Woodruff (ugh) and Aaron Brown (yay!) discussed Bush's little furrowed-brow "48 Hours" speech just after its completion. As they spoke, the crawler at the bottom of the screen constantly dispersed information. I noticed that at one point, the crawler displayed four consecutive stories about direct action protests around the country, including but not limited to San Francisco. And this is where many people go to get their information. From this evidence, the more protests the better.

Another way of looking at it? Consider the "big lie" practice of conservatives. Someone, either Fox News, Drudge, the Washington Times, or someone, makes an allegation that may not be grounded in any sort of fact. Right wing media circles repeat it as much as they can, creating an "echo chamber", eventually picked up by some sort of mainstream media, and the story's off and running. This, ladies and gents, is how Al Gore invented the internet. My point is this: If conservatives can do this so effectively with lies and deception, why can't we "flood the zone" with truths and actions?

Anyway, it's an hour and 40min until we become an aggressor nation, so I'd better go.