[Peace-discuss] Lysistrata's Twangy Remake - Not a Strike, but a Lockout

[Robert Naiman]

[Links in original -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/lysistratas-twangy-remak_b_45957.html]

Lysistrata's Twangy Remake - Not a Strike, but a Lockout

The mistakes of the general public as they work to organize themselves
politically are more fruitful than the clever plans of political
strategists, a German antiwar activist once wrote. (After her
parliamentary colleagues voted for a war budget, she said: "There are
only two men left in our party - me and Clara Zetkin.")

Rep. Rahm Emanuel is telling Democratic party leaders to "continue to
ratchet up the pressure on Bush" on Iraq. Sen. Majority Leader Reid is
co-sponsoring a bill that "would cut off funding for the Iraq war
within a year and set a hard deadline for withdrawing troops," a move
that "will give a bright green light to other members...making it
harder to satisfy the party's base with anything less than a hard
timeline for withdrawal," writes Lois Romano in the Washington Post.

But check out this video on YouTube.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAChVVVZaM.) Talk about supporting
the troops! Put this woman in charge of strategic communications
immediately. (Warning: younger viewers will find this particularly
enchanting. There's no nudity or profanity - nothing you couldn't
broadcast on the public airwaves in 2007 - but Anthony Comstock would
not have approved.)

The narrator bemoans the absence of the troops from the "homeland,"
and her plaintive lament could not be more timely. Last Wednesday the
Pentagon announced that Army deployments would be extended from 12 to
15 months (a 25% increase, for those scoring at home.) A day earlier,
in typical Orwellian fashion, the President had charged that
Democrats' efforts to impose a deadline for the withdrawal of troops
from Iraq would lead to longer deployments.

As William Bennett famously opined, "Where is the outrage?" Our
soldiers and their families are expected to meekly accept the
President's new orders. After all, they signed on the dotted line.

But which of them imagined, when they signed on that line, that what
the President had in store for them were the longest deployments since
World War II?

I gather that some of our active-duty soldiers have access to the
internet. I hope that they have the opportunity to check out our
modern-day Lysistrata. (Aristophanes, eat your heart out.) And I hope
that at least one of these soldiers will immediately sign on to the
legally protected Appeal for Redress, asking their Congressional
Representative and US Senators to support the withdrawal of all
American military forces and bases from Iraq.

...

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