In Defense of Lew Rockwell

by Joshua Frank

Recently, Jacob Laksin over at the dreadful FrontPageMag.com snapped at Lew Rockwell, the libertarian-minded editor of the popular LewRockwell.com, for aligning himself with the most "unhinged elements of the far left." I mean really, you've got to laugh out loud when saps like Laksin get all huffy over trivial matters. Come to think of it, though, this isn't that trivial a matter. Any major alliances against U.S. Empire means the movement against the war in Iraq must be making serious headway.

The American public isn't happy about this war, or the Bush administration, for that matter. They don't trust the liar-in-chief, and the polls are finally confirming it. In New York State, which is a liberal haven (or is it? Governor Pataki is a foam-mouthed right-winger, and so are Mayor Bloomberg and his predecessor Giuliani, heck so is Senator Clinton – but no matter), Bush has reached an all-time low of 29 percent, according to a recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University. Things aren't looking much better for Bush and his agenda nationally, either. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Sept. 16-18, 67 percent of respondents said they disapproved of how Bush is handling the Iraq war, with 59 percent admitting that they thought the 2003 invasion was a mistake.

Those numbers must worry the neocons and their feeble apologists like Mr. Laksin and David Horowitz. Rather than deal with reality, they'd just as soon make up fantastic conspiracy theories that leftists are taking over the whole friggin' world. Communism is all but dead. Yet, if you were ever to wander over and scroll on through FrontPageMag.com (I don't recommend it; the prose is unbearable and the analysis puerile), you'd think Stalin was still shipping my ancestors off to the gulag.

Sorry, but it's the neocons we've got to worry about today. Not the Bolsheviks.

President Bush and co. can only get away with their imperial agendas as long as the U.S. public remains catatonic. But alas, citizens are slowly waking from their slumber, and Bush's henchmen at FrontPage aren't the least bit happy about it.

Any alliance between occasional political foes more than worries the pro-war gang; it scares the holy bejesus out of 'em. In their little, twisted, misinformed worlds, if the majority of America starts turning on Bush, they must simultaneously be thumbing through the pages of the Communist Manifesto. That's hogwash, of course. All the new poll numbers indicate is that Americans realize they've been lied to, spit on, and slapped around by the Bush administration. And they've had enough of it.

The one-issue alliance of Rockwell and folks like me only means we see it as necessary to come together and oppose this brutal, illegal war. We aren't talking regulations here. We're talking about misguided U.S. foreign policy that's killed tens of thousands of people. And no matter what the FPM crew say, it's not Commie of Rockwell and his readers to say that this war must stop, now. It's humane of them.

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