RALEIGH – Having been in the prognostication business for a number of years now, I have had to live down my share of bad calls. My election-prediction record, previously stellar, crashed last November when a last-minute surge by Al Gore and Mike Easley erased what I pegged as small Republican leads in the presidential and gubernatorial popular vote.
But, so far at least, I have never faced the need for the kind of apology that some North Carolinians and others are now obligated, IMHO, to make. I’m talking about those misguided souls who opposed American military action in Afghanistan post 9/11 for all the wrong reasons. Now let me be clear: I understand and respect those who, for deeply felt moral or religious reasons, adhere to pacifism. (I don’t agree with them, mind you, particularly those who mistakenly believe that the Ten Commandments includes the statement “thou shalt not kill,” which it does not except in poor translations.)
The anti-war folks I am talking about include those who said it would be a miserable failure. They pegged it wrong and should admit so (as some embarrassed journalists, like the clueless and sanctimonious Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio recently did). Even worse were those fellow-travelers who said they opposed the war because it was racist, because it was anti-Islamic, or because it served the interest of transnational corporations and other capitalist villains.
One key organizer of the kooky-left core of the anti-war movement began its life as an anti-free trade spin-off of the Worker’s World Party, a communist group that supports North Korea and Cuba. It is called ANSWER, which preposterously stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. ANSWER sponsored the Sept. 29 anti-war demonstration in Washington and has distributed a diatribe against the American action in Afghanistan signed by hundreds of people worldwide.
The lead signatory is Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general and now full-time nitwit. Who else signed the ANSWER screed? The Rev. Curtis Gatewood of Durham, whose antics continue to entertain many in North Carolina – though certainly not the NAACP, who has basically, and properly, excommunicated him. I was on a panel with Gatewood a few years ago memorable primarily because it was the only time I have been called a “cracker,” at least to my face. It felt so retro that I next expected to hear the “Theme from S.W.A.T.”
Another North Carolinian who signed the ANSWER statement was our old friend Stan Goff, a Triangle-area activist. Strictly on a professional level, I have admired Goff ever since he and his wife succeeded in scoring a lengthy piece in The News & Observer covering an informational meeting they held for the state’s Communist Party even though they, by themselves, outnumbered the audience.
A couple of other N.C. signatories get a pass from me because they appear to be young and in college. Not so Gatewood and Goff and the others, in academic sinecures and elsewhere, who indulged their radical tendencies during the past three months without revealing even a smidgen of knowledge or common sense. Yes, I’ll defend their right to free speech, Voltaire and “to the death” and all that. But I’ll snicker, too.