Sadly, the title for this post is not sarcastic. Marc Cooper brings the unfortunate, if not all that surprising, news -- originally reported by Al Jazeera -- that Ramsey Clark is joining Saddam Hussein's legal defense team. Clark was an attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, but he's long since gone off the deep end into the authoritarian loony left.
I share Cooper's extreme distaste for Clark and his various protest outfits. (As an impetuous first-year, I even wrote a letter to the local alternative paper blasting the outfit, which immediately accused me of red-baiting). But I don't agree with his conclusion that ANSWER's sponsorship of several of the larger protests did serious damage to the anti-war movement's effectiveness, if for no other reason than the organization's sinister political agenda went mostly unnoticed in mainstream press coverage. There may be a way for massive street protests to be an effective tool for political persuasion, but the anti-war ones mostly weren't, regardless of whether Clark was associated with them.
Posted by Michael at January 3, 2005 02:17 PM | TrackBack