the link<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a0I\u2019ve been surprised \u2013 and pleased \u2013 to notice, in my virtual travels, that someone has preceded me, and posted that very message or a similar one before I could get there. My strenuous \u2013 some might say over-strenuous \u2013 twittering on this subject may have been responsible for some of that, and I want to take this opportunity to urge you to help me out here.<\/p>\n
\u00a0It\u2019s actually not as boring as it sounds: life in the comments section, as you may know, can be interesting. Just reading these numerous comments on the Hagel controversy has been very enlightening \u2013 and instructive. For example, if you go to neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin\u2019s page on the Washington Post<\/em> web site, and look at the comments appended to her anti-Hagel tirades, they are a virtual tsunami of disdain directed at the author. Commenter after commenter ridicules her transparent \u201carguments\u201d that always seem to be based on the operative principle of \u201cIs it good for Israel?\u201d What\u2019s good for America never seems to enter the occasion. That comments section has no doubt been a rich source of petition signatures.<\/p>\n\u00a0The inside-the-Beltway types and their lobbyist friends have enforced a foreign policy orthodoxy that Hagel, in many ways, defies: that\u2019s why they\u2019re out to not only nix his nomination but to destroy him. The people, however, are with Hagel, and against the Lobby \u2013 and our job is to mobilize them, and educate them in the process.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Nearly all the responses I have seen to our campaign, coming from our supporters, have been \u2026 well, supportive<\/em>. In the hours after we emailed our appeal, it was kind of thrilling to watch the numbers on the counter take a qualitative leap forward. So far, we have more than doubled the number I originally managed to garner on my own, and the signatures are still coming in.<\/p>\n\u00a0The problem is, we need them to keep coming \u2013 and at a much faster rate. Which is why I\u2019m here, now, hectoring you. Please help me out: I need people to troll the internet, looking for likely places to publicize this important campaign. If you have a web site, you might want to post it there: if you have a Twitter account, please tweet the link to your \u201cfollowers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0I don\u2019t want to go on about this, but I have to say I did this on impulse. As the neocons let loose their mudslide of smears, amid growing speculation the President might cave, a jolt of pure anger catapulted me back into my office chair, after a long work day, and compelled<\/em> me to go to the White House petition site. Quite aside from his views, the sight of a man of such obvious personal integrity being pilloried in a disgusting orgy of baseless slander was just too much for me to bear. I had <\/em>to do something.<\/p>\n\u00a0Well, I have to go back to what is now my job: trolling the internet and pasting my message with accompanying link: see you there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have gotten so many letters about our campaign to fight the smear campaign against Chuck Hagel that I can\u2019t possibly respond to them individually, and so I\u2019m taking to the Antiwar.com blog to answer and to give our readers and supporters an update. \u00a0It is now Day Two and a half of the petition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-17522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17522"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17524,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17522\/revisions\/17524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17522"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}