Thanks to both of you for your replies. Your remarks are absolutely on the button. Very true. No new Lt. John False Kerry would get the kind of attention that he got back then.......and I suppose that the Dixie Chicks would be the closest one could get to Jane Fonda of yore....and they fizzled in their melodramatic act, IMHO.
Char
Well, actually - the biggest difference of all is in the correlation of forces and the terrain . Nobody is allied with Iraq's insurgents who is a credible military/geopolitical rival to the US. Nobody is therefore in a positon to give industrial-strength physical aid and comfort to the antidemocratic forces. Much as the mullahs of Iran might enjoy it, they themselves have a legitimacy problem internally.Seeing people dancing in the streets for having had the experience of officially registering their political judgement at the polls is a sobering experience for muslim tyrants, who must consider how that looks to their own people. Likewise the Dixie Chicks and suchlike are actually pretty thick on the ground - but they have a severe political problem in that it's becoming too clear that Iraq is becoming the most democratic polity in the middle east (Israel always excepted). In the wake of Saddam, Uday, and Cousay (sp), there really is no alternative to the present Iraqi government which an advocate of democracy can call legitimate.
It is of course true that "liberalism" - being nothing more than the manifestation of journalism as the Establishment - is antithetical to democracy. But of course, that is on the QT. Can't give the peons an overdose of truth . . .