Go back to this link, and carefully look through the pictures...

Done. At some length. Here's a few of them...

I've gotta say, now more than ever, I can not see where you're coming from. These people are a menace to American society? Granted, there are some burning US flags, but they're in Chile, Mexico, Buenos Aires and Amman. And yeah, the word "socialist" pops up on a few signs. But it's permitted to, isn't it?

As Bowser has asked, why is it that a protestor's sign is supposed to get us all worked up into a lather, but the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis, for no demonstrable reason, can be shrugged off? In what way has the invasion of Iraq impacted al Qaida...except of course for diverting massive American resources away from the hunt for bin Laden? (Let's not ponder here also the diversion of our resources away from other things like human spaceflight.)

The protestors are exercising their right to free speech, venting anger against what they must have seen as a horrifying atrocity. They are free to do so. The fact that they vocalize disagreement with the actions of the American government does not necessarily make them puppets of some shadowy underground communist organization bent on world domination, any more than your support for the same necessarily makes you a stooge for rapid baby-eating capitalist war-mongers.

Some of the protestors go too far in their verbage, I agree. Calling for US officers to be fragged is beyond the pale, perhaps even illegal if it can be determined that it encourages violence against an identifiable group, which arguably it can. But in all honesty, Tom, what percentage of the left do you really think buys into that kind of nonsense (advocating violence against our own people)? I'd be amazed if it approached even just a small fraction of one percent.

And as for the anger specifically against Bush...well, the man was front and center in making the war happen. Could there have been signs admonishing Saddam to get rid of his WMD? I suppose there could have been, except of course many of these people were probably listening to the UN when it said he didn't seem to have any. (As an aside, I personally don't feel anger toward Bush. I'm not at all sure anymore that he should be president, but that's a different matter.)

And as for the comparisons with Gulf War 1...it was a different war. Iraq was clearly an aggressor...it had invaded a much smaller, weaker country, one that was no danger to it. So the world was rightly outraged at Saddam's action. This time around, the shoe is very much on the other foot. We were the aggressor. We as a nation agreed to go to war based on "intelligence" that was preposterously wrong. If we weren't certain beyond a shadow of a doubt, then we had no business dropping bombs into the middle of another country's capitol city.

We screwed up. Royally. And we need to admit it both to ourselves and to the world.