Promise You Won't Bring Back Bell Bottoms

Yes, today's Style section cover, Peace by Pieces, is a love letter to antiwar protesters as we near a rally this Saturday:

One after another their trails led them here -- from California, New York, Baltimore -- disparate members of the same movement, drawn by some strong instinct that told them: Now is the time. This is the place....

Vietnam? The unquiet ghost, the untamed analogy, is loose in the air. There's that old nervy feeling that Something Is Happening. Here. Now. But you could be mistaken.

Every movement needs a crossroads, a watering hole, an asylum. Busboys and Poets -- part restaurant, bookstore, theater -- opened a couple weeks ago, at 14th and V streets NW, just in time for the peace movement's headiest days in forever.

Plump couches, radical books, free WiFi, $5 microbrews, killer sound system, a menu that runs from catfish and collard greens to peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches: a cool, comfortable, slightly bourgy haven for a hot, bothered, slightly bourgy peace movement....

Groovy.

Critics cannot easily dismiss this incarnation of antiwar enthusiasm as a fringe passion of anarchists, communists and freaks (though an author still tried to make that case last month at a Heritage Foundation forum). Recent polls say a majority of Americans -- as many as 59 percent -- think the war in Iraq is a "mistake" and the troops should be brought home. (Brought home when? That's another question.)

Cannot easily dismiss this incarnation... as a fringe passion.... Putting aside the mysterious cameo of an unnamed author at an unexplained forum, it does become difficult to dismiss this incarnation as a fringe passion when you refuse to tell us everything about the passions.

It's not just withholding information about Cindy Sheehan, so that writer David Montgomery can paint her as the protesters' "Mother Courage" (did Mother Courage say President Bush is the biggest terrorist and officials who support him are war criminals? Perhaps. Email me). It's a habit and it covers more territory.

For example, there's the failure to report on the background of International ANSWER, which Montgomery (and everyone else at the Post) blandly refers to as an organizer of the protest. They're much more interesting than that. ANSWER is an arm of the Stalinist Workers World Party. This is not a careless insult; it's just tellin' it like it is. Here's a handy summary:

"International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front group for the communist Workers World Party. The Workers World Party is, literally, a Stalinist organization. It rose out of a split within the old Socialist Workers Party over the Soviet Union's 1956 invasion of Hungary -- the breakaway Workers World Party was all for the invasion. International ANSWER today unquestioningly supports any despotic regime that lays any claim to socialism, or simply to anti-Americanism. It supported the butchers of Beijing after the slaughter of Tiananmen Square. It supports Saddam Hussein and his Baathist torture-state. It supports the last official Stalinist state, North Korea, in the mass starvation of its citizens. It supported Slobodan Milosevic after the massacre at Srebrenica. It supports the mullahs of Iran, and the narco-gangsters of Colombia and the bus-bombers of Hamas."

That's the late Michael Kelly, writing in January, 2003 as quoted by Powerline. Here's Montgomery, writing today:

Seeking to capitalize on the momentum, Cagan's United for Peace and Justice and the ANSWER Coalition have organized a rally and encirclement of the White House on Saturday morning that they hope will draw 100,000.

Whew! All done!

Just as it did during the time of Kelly's piece in 2003, the Washington Post seems incapable of telling its readers the truth about this group. Back then, it left that task to an opinion columnist--one of the best--just as it has outsourced reporting on Sheehan to columnist George Will, who as far as I've been able to determine is the only writer in the Post who has dared to fully inform the public about her.

Cannot easily dismiss this incarnation... as a fringe passion. Not the way you carefully report it, no.

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