Anti war, anti Bush, anti Republican, pro Democrat -- same thing

One of the things that should be surprising about the war efforts of Barack Obama, but isn't, is the near silence of the boisterous anti-war crowd that was the msm darling during the Bush administration. Cindy Sheehan, for those who don't remember, was a mother who had lost a son in Iraq, and she was the toast of the liberal media. She had the moral authority we shouldn't ignore, it was claimed. Then came the election, and Sheehan, to her credit, appears to have stuck to her principles, but the media couldn't be bothered by this has-been when Barack Obama is leading the world to utopia.

It was all partisan politics. Jonathan Gurwitz made that point in 2011 with Anti-war movement was really anti-Republican. Gurwitz drew on the work of Dr. Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Dr. Fabio Rojas of Indiana University to make his point. Excerpt:

In a study published in March, they explain that “the anti-war movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments, withdrew from anti-war protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success.” Heaney and Rojas add, “Our results convincingly demonstrate a strong relationship between partisanship and the dynamics of the anti-war movement.”

In other words, the anti-war movement was basically anti-Republican. Joe Weisenthal dug up the study and produced a chart from it at businessinsider.com. Click on the thumbnail on the right to get a bigger picture of the anti-war movement composition and how it disappeared after Obama took office.

To be sure, there are still anti-war demonstrators, but they number in the tens -- for example the ones against the suddenly hawkish John Kerry. See Red-stained hands wave in protest at U.S. hearing on Syria. And that would present a dilemma for Democrats if the numbers weren't so small. But there are obviously some in the anti-war movement who didn't know it was only politics. Do you suppose they feel that they were used by the left to secure power? Useful idiots? Trained seals performing on cue? They should. But they did their job and are no longer needed, so now the left wants them to get lost.  It's almost enough to make feel sorry for them.

Link to the Heaney and Rojas study: The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the US, 2007-2009.