There's Only One Kind of Bush I Like, and the President Is Not It

Life is hard.

Of late, it has been getting more and more difficult to truly feel superior and pissed off at the same time. It's like being a tweaker who lives in a meth lab. Surrounded by your drug of choice, it takes more and more to get you anywhere near that special place.

I mean, there are so many ignorant people saying so many stupid things, you just kind of get used to feeling superior. The high is gone. And since so many of them hold elected or appointed office, the same goes for being pissed off.

So it was with joy and gratitude that I stumbled over Sullivan's self-righteous mocking of anti-war protestors.

I can't feel my face, man.

First off, I am, at best (or at worst, depending on your viewpoint) ambivalent towards the prospect of going to war. But really, my opinion on the situation should not be relevant when discussing the anti-war movement. And neither should Sullivan's. The difference between us, of course, is that I realize this, while he remains blissfully unaware.

You have to envy Sullivan his moral clarity (read: rejection of intellectual effort). War Folk Good, Anti-War Folk very very bad. It must be nice to be able to completely avoid engaging the opposition's ideas by simply declaring them all idiots (unlike Mr. Sullivan, we here at VeryVeryHappy are fully aware of the possible hypocrisy of our condemnation of Sullivan for painting the other side as idiots en masse. However, we feel our condemnation is Righteous, because we emphatically do not accuse all war proponents of idiocy [all warbloggers, perhaps, but not all proponents]). He really gets quite snotty, including his fallback to the Eternal Cry of Conservatism: The young are stupid and not nearly as smart and clever as we were when we were young ( "It's as if an entire generation or more has forgotten what an argument is"). Unfortunately for him, the list of anti-war protest slogans he displays to make fun of those against the war actually does the opposite.

Go look at the list. It's fairly wide ranging, with an obviously broad spectrum of views represented - everything from the eco-warriors to the feminists to the veterans to the geeks to the civil-liberties crowd. This is not a crowd of Bolsheviks. Are some of them lame? Yes. Childish? A few. Mean-spirited? Perhaps, but I approve of that kind of thing from time to time. But, throughout almost every single one, there runs one common thread (besides the obvious anti-war message): these people do not trust the President. And no matter how much the Right may mock these people, as the crowds grow larger, the message will only become stronger: George W. Bush is not trusted by the American people.

And that's a message I'll shout from the rooftops, regardless of how I feel about war.

Sidenote: The title of this post is my own personal contribution to the anti-war slogan bank (and is now, officially, the Second Motto of this site), and as such, I hope to see it on a sign somewhere. So get the word out, huh?