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http://instapundit.com/archives/025756.php
September 23, 2005
MATT RUSTLER has taken up my suggestion to Google anti-war protesters mentioned in press accounts and has found, to his shock, that they're not always the starry-eyed naifs that the news reports suggest.
"'Novice' protestor? Not hardly."
UPDATE: Read this, too. And LT SMASH writes: "The anti-war movement is stuck on stupid."
Along, it seems, with its enablers in the press.
posted at 03:17 PM by Glenn Reynolds
"SPINNING THE PROTESTS" REDUX
Glenn Reynolds proposed that readers Google the names mentioned in this WaPo article on the upcoming anti-war rallies in D.C., entitled "Antiwar Rally Will Be First for Many: Focused Message Draws Protestors of All Stripes." That sounded like fun, so I obliged by starting with the first name in the article, "Patrice Cuddy."
To hear the WaPo tell it, Patrice is a mild-mannered, middle-aged former schoolteacher from Olathe, Kansas, and will be a "novice protestor" in the upcoming rallies. The Post article seems to suggest that Cuddy represents a growing contingent of small town, mainstream, Red State Americans who're beginning to join in anti-war protests:
[T]hey will be joined by novice protesters such as Patrice Cuddy, 56. Interviewed by phone yesterday, the former public school teacher in Olathe, Kan., said she had to pull off her gardening gloves each time a neighbor interrupted her yardwork to ask about joining the bus she had chartered to go to the nation's capital. [Look! Even mild-mannered retirees from flyover country -- and their neighbors -- will be joining the protest!]
"It's small and it's quiet here in Johnson County, but more and more people are becoming part of the group that doesn't agree with this war," said Cuddy, who was planning to load about 45 people onto the bus in a Home Depot parking lot this morning for the 20-hour ride to Washington.
Organizers say that similar busloads of teachers, nurses, housewives and others with little experience in mass protest are coming from Wisconsin, New Mexico, Illinois, Iowa, Georgia, Ohio and many other states. [Look! More protestors from flyover country!]
"This demonstration will reflect, by far, the most diverse group of antiwar protesters since before the war began," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for the ANSWER Coalition, one of the event's sponsors. "We have people coming from all political persuasions, including a very large number of people who have never before been part of the antiwar movement or protest activity." [See, protests aren't just for International ANSWER and coastal urbanites anymore!]
But it turns out that Patrice Cuddy is also known as "J. Patrice Cuddy-Lamoree (see here and here), and has been helping organize antiwar protests from the beginning. Here's the Internet Archive of a website that Patrice edits, Wyeyed ("Wide-Eyed"), containing many photos from the February 15, 2003 anti-war rally of United for Peace and Justice, in New York City. No word on whether Patrice herself took those photos, but she says openly, on her blog at Greater Kansas City Democracy for America: "I have been in the streets since the beginning of this war . . . " And she advises her readers at Kansas City IndyMedia (where she has been posting since at least February of '03) : "If you ever get an opportunity to go to one of these big rallies, DO IT! A Total rave thing without the drugs and alcohol." She once tried to march in a local St. Patrick's Day parade as an "Elf for Peace," carrying "PEACE IS GREEN signs decorated with shamrocks."
"Novice" protestor? Not hardly.
Now, look: From reviewing websites (and the Google caches of websites) to which Cuddy-Lamoree has posted messages, she comes across as, well, pretty "out there" from my perspective, but not a complete, raving, America-hating psychotic. Although there's plenty of typical, progressive, anti-Bush, anti-corporate rhetoric mixed in with her stuff, and she thinks Fahrenheit 9/11 was a "state of the art-documentary film!", I can find no statements by her praising the "Minutemen" of Iraq, no overt attacks on American soldiers, nothing anti-Semitic in her writings (just the opposite, in fact). I'm not claiming that she's in the same league as ANSWER. I'm simply saying that it strikes me as very odd that she'd be chosen to represent the putatively growing contingent of mainstream, "novice" antiwar protestors "of all stripes" if such a contingent actually existed, because she certainly doesn't fit the profile. Draw your own conclusions.
UPDATE: Chris Hall at Spacecraft, who appears to have beaten me to the punch but not to the Instalanche, has more on "novice" protestor Patrice, including the fact that she is in fact a member of ANSWER (so I take back what I said in the preceding pagraph about "not claiming that she's in the same league as ANSWER"), and describes herself as a "Life long Labor Democrat, arms-control, peace, environmental activist since the mid 1970s . . ."
dilloduck said:Pitiful--they can't even fake it anymore.
