Was it 45,000 or maybe 100,000 in attendance, who really knows?

Consider this. Standing on the curb as the front of the march passes, it would be almost 3 hours before you’d see the end.

The Civic Center is a wash in people!

it is disturbing to see how many folks in SF would go to bat for a murderous tyrant.

Just as was the case in VietNam, the oppressive dictators are counting upon the useful fools of the American Left to paint the American president as the bad guy, and thus give the brutal dictator more time to maneuver.

As usual, the hate America crowd plays right into their hands.

Obviously, most people in this crowd have no sympathy for Saddam. Their binding principle is a desire to see the US weakened. . . to lose this war. In that manner, they can further their own domestic agendas.

The organizers proudly boast about the wide array of groups participating in this protest. . . however, they have one common element, a deep and abiding hatred for the US. (And a general ignorance of the US's role in the world. . . which leads to this hatred.)

Very disturbing indeed.

Fortunately, in the real America (those places other than LA, SF and NYC), regular Americans understand that we are a nation under siege, and that destroying Saddam is an important step in bringing a real peace to the middle east, and that no amount of phoney baloney UN inspectors can do what 500,000 US military personnel can do, which is to actually bring down Saddam.

My mommy says I shouldn’t chat to PERVERTS or RIGHT WING SPAMMERS.

1. International A.N.S.W.E.R. is made up of Democrats. Most of the principal organizers just oppose unilateral action against Iraq. They are not "America-haters," they're just more moderate than you are. Jesse Jackson spoke for chrissakes! Union officials addressed the protestors. The AFL-CIO is definitely not the bastion of left-radicalism conservatives would make it out to be. the theme from the podiums might as well have been "i love america, but..."

2. If the U.N. inspectors are so phoney-baloney, than why does Bush constantly refer to their reports(however manipulatively) and why is the U.S. so insistant on getting them back on Iraqi soil? Could it t be that before UNSCOM was removed in 1998 they were saying that Iraq was really close to being completely disarmed? Does former-inspector and US MARINE Scott Ritter going before the international media and directly contradicting the official line from washington constitute phoney-baloney?

Its a little conceited of you to think that you, or ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh knows more than the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N.

3. Opinion polls commonly show more unease within "the real america" in regards to Iraq than you would suggest. In fact they are more in line with the position of International A.N.S.W.E.R. But then again, what do you mean by "real america?" The monied white conservative Protestants that make up the base of the Republican voting bloc? Ex-military men? Rich Iraqi exiles?

that should have been "3 points for T-Mex"

change that title to 3 points for T-Mex

The big anti-war rally over the weekend was a standard affair — only you wouldn’t really know it from the New York Times’s coverage. That was rather standard too.

From Reuters, one could discern the following. The demonstrators chanted, “George Bush, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

That’s awfully interesting, isn’t it? I have heard this since college. There, “genocide” was a big word — and it didn’t refer to the Nazis, to the Russian Communists, to the Khmer Rouge, or to Mao. It referred to Reagan, usually. Not only his foreign policy, but his domestic policies. This was outrageous and obnoxious, of course, but I often wondered whether the kids knew what “genocide” meant: the murder of an entire people.

If you want to charge genocide, why not Saddam Hussein? He did a number on the Kurds, even if he didn’t succeed in exterminating them all.

And the kids and the other nuts have been shouting the same thing — the same words — for years: “[INSERT REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN HERE], you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Considering their imaginative use of the important word “genocide,” you’d think that they could come up with some new slanders.

And did you catch Susan Sarandon, who makes Barbra Streisand look like Edmund Burke or someone? She said, “Let us resist this war. Let us hate war in all its forms, whether the weapon used is a missile or an airplane.” A missile: That’s us. An airplane: That’s al Qaeda. This is as neat a moral equivalence as I’ve noticed in a long while.

And, speaking of oldies, there were signs reading, “No blood for oil!” It occurred to me: Were these stored in a closet since 1990, or were they fresh-painted? Also, there were pictures of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld beneath the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Cute, huh?

Most encouragingly — heartwarmingly, actually — there were, according to Reuters, “about 500 Iraqi exiles [who had come] to Washington to show support for efforts to remove Saddam from power.” Apparently, the anti-war protesters didn’t like them so much. The poor Iraqis couldn’t have been more off-message.

Again, all this was Reuters. But the New York Times’s story seemed: incredibly sanitized. I have no doubt that it was all accurate. It’s just that I have a very strong suspicion that it was frightfully incomplete. The reporter, Lynette Clemetson, seemed to be going out of her way to make the protesters seem as well-meaning and non-kooky as possible. All good liberals, no America-hating nuts. They were all . . . you know, idealistic college kids giving up the Saturday football game to participate in a grand civic enterprise.

The reporter found one professor — Nancy Kanwisher, a “cognitive neuroscientist” from MIT — who said, “The people here are not automatically anti-war. Many of the experts in the field, many of whom are notorious hawks, are opposing this war. This is not just radicals.”

I see. “What a difference a day makes,” Ernestine Anderson used to sing. And what a difference a report makes.