Power Line has photos, showing losers carrying signs reading, among other things, "Socialist revolution is the only solution," "Free Iraq from imperialist occupation," and "9-11 was an inside job: Bush liar murderer, terrorist."Yet if you read the news coverage--e.g., the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post--you'd have no idea that this was anything more than a gathering of normal, if perhaps slightly overenthusiastic, Americans.
The Times gives away the game when it says, in its lead paragraph, that the event "evoked the angry spirit of the Vietnam era protests of more than three decades ago." But that era's protests draw huge numbers of people, many of them young men who didn't want to get drafted and young women who didn't want the supply of men curtailed by the draft.
Many of those baby boomers grew up to be journalists, and many of them wish to keep alive the idea that their motives back then were idealistic rather than selfish. So it's no wonder that the press describes today's Potemkin "antiwar" movement as if it were the real thing. (Source: James Taranto in the "Best of the Web" column over at WSJ Online.)
