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Frustrating Apathy

These guys are right. It’s too bad Americans aren’t more concerned about foreign policy. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 

Three protesters, a half-dozen signs and a missing petition.

“People walk past and say, ‘I’m glad you’re doing something,’ ” said Marty O’Malley, a Forest Hills council member who has attended more than 100 anti-Iraq war events, as he stood in front of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle’s Downtown office last week with the small gathering of activists.

“I want to shake them and say, ‘Why aren’t you doing something!?’ ”

After $500 billion in spending and 4,000 military deaths, this was supposed to be an election year dominated by the war.

Both Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, support a withdrawal, while Sen. John McCain, a Republican, argues that the U.S. risks losing Iraq to terrorist groups and Iranian influence if troops leave before the country is stable.

In Washington, D.C., Congress is preparing to consider President Bush’s latest emergency funding package for the fighting, with a price tag of $108 billion.

But a worsening economy has easily overtaken Iraq as the top concern for voters, according to a New York Times/CBS poll released last week. Only 17 percent of respondents picked the war as the “one issue” they’d like to hear the candidates discuss more.

Americans still have strong feelings about the conflict: 62 percent want the next president to pull out of Iraq within a year or two of taking office, the poll said. Yet war opponents and supporters are having trouble getting the public’s — and the media’s — attention.

A March survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press discovered that just 28 percent of Americans knew the approximate number of U.S. deaths in the war.

“Obviously, I wish that the American people were more engaged in understanding what’s at stake in Iraq,” said Pete Hegseth, who served there with the 101st Airborne Division and is now executive director of Vets for Freedom. “I think it’s unfortunate that here on the homefront we’re not interested in what’s going on overseas.”

I’d say take it as a vote to let the professionals/volunteers do their jobs.

Topics: Iraq, pols, America

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 3:04 pm on Tuesday, May 6, 2008

3 Responses to “Frustrating Apathy”

1. Liberty Peak Lodge Says:
   May 6th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

   Tuesday Blogorati

   Sacred Meditation Symbol Been awhile since I did a Blogorati Ciceronious! Reckon we need one. I always like to visit Tigerhawk. The boy do know how to blog. We at Liberty Peak, who are new to blogging, seek to adapt,

2. Michael Lonie Says:
   May 8th, 2008 at 12:33 am

   I doubt if any more than a fraction of that percentage of Americans want the USA defeated in Iraq, which is what a pullout as proposed by the Dems would mean. What’s more it would also be a defeat in the larger war on the jihadist terrorists. They will run wild. For most Americans there is still a bad taste in the mouth from our cowardly stab in the back of the Vietnamese and Cambodians. By contrast the leftists (who now control the Democratic Party) love that. To them, America is the real enemy and all America’s enemies are their allies.

   Such a pusillanimous bugout would also help discredit democratic government around the world. Here would be the sight of the world’s most powerful democracy, and it cannot fight a necessary and just war abroad due to its democratic form of government. Anybody who thinks that won’t be a massive blow to democratic reform around the world is living in Cloudcuckooland. But there again it is something that I must conclude the Dems will welcome. They’re not too keen on democracy here (which is why they have their legislative program enacted by Supreme Court decisions rather than by legislatures responsible to the voters). I doubt they care about it anywhere else.

3. MikeH Says:
   May 8th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

   Oh goody, can we play *pin the tail on the enemy*?

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