That is all fine and well, but you know what? This nation still started a war with an admittedly belligerent but ultimately harmless (at least as far as US security goes) dictator over a series of lies and shifting rationales. An uncounted number of innocent Iraqis are dead, our own casualties are fast-approaching 2,000 and the Bush junta has created a terrorist training ground. And here at home, our anti-war movement seems largely shiftless and incapable of effecting change.

When marchers rounded the last leg of the march route two Saturdays ago, Capitol building straight ahead in the near-distance and a line of cops acting like so many traffic cops, directing the crowd to turn left and head back up Constitution toward the walk�s commencement point, there was no thought, not even a last-minute half-hearted effort, to change the route on the fly and plunge ahead. No call for going anywhere but where the authorities�both law enforcement and organizing�directed.

Unlike the inauguration protests, there were no breakaway marches leading District and Park police on a cat-and-mouse chase through downtown. No challenges to restrictions on movement. Participants offered mostly polite understanding to counter-protesters carrying signs accusing rally and march participants of being terrorists, communists (which some certainly�and proudly�were) and criminals.

The guys with the bible and the bullhorn�a nice light blue-and-white job adorned with a sticker bearing the word �homo� in a circle with a line through it�gained a crowd of curious onlookers, but nary a shout of opposition to their particular brand of fascism.

As it turns out, the days of varied opposition to the Republican National Convention in New York City last year don�t look anymore to me like the start of something big. Instead, in my mind the whole week is diminished as the end of something small.

The weekend of anti-war actions were barely that. Certainly no body took chances or put their body and freedom on the line the way they did in New York last fall (here, here, here and here).

And please don�t say a thing to me about the so-called civil disobedience Monday. Three hundred and seventy people get arrested after promising docility in exchange for quick processing and release? And we�re supposed to applaud this? Give me a break. That wasn�t activism, it was a press conference.

After the rally, I read Liza Feathstone�s account of the protests on the Nation�s website and could only say, �Where the hell was she? This certainly isn�t the protest I saw.�

Rhetoric? There was plenty of that from both speakers on the Ellipse stage and from the music stage later in the day. From calls for solidarity with the Palestinian cause from speakers on the one stage, to incitements to kill company CEOs from musicians on the other, there was plenty to offend your run-of-the-mill center left type who finds the Nation a bit too radical at times.

Too bad most people seemed to miss the message. Even with former Dead Kennedy�s front man Jello Biafra playing MC, the crowd failed to get it (not that Jello was exhorting anybody to do anything, mind you). But they seemed pretty happy to see Joan Biaz and dream of doing something.

Meanwhile, just yards to the South, up the hilltop the Washington Monument sits atop, First Lady Laura Bush hosted a book fair. Yet no crew of activists clamoring for change sought to bring their message to the folks gathered there�it was, after all, outside of the protected protest area.

Three hundred thousand people--think about it, that�s more folks than the City of Buffalo has seen in nearly a decade�on the Ellipse of the White House, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, allegedly angry and calling for change and the District and US Park Police essentially got a day off.

Tell me again, where�s the outrage? By Brendan Coyne

Looking back at the handful of mass protests against the Bush administration I have covered in the past year and a half or so, I�m struck with the profoundly depressing realization that the steam is running out of the movement�if there ever was a movement to speak of. The massive yet uneventful happenings of two weekends ago only serve to seal my point.

Consider, as Ben Dangl and I reported for The NewStandard, that as many as 300,000, and quite possibly more, people converged on the nation�s capitol on the last weekend of September to express their outrage with the Bush administration, yet nothing happened. And I mean nothing.

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