Have You Seen This Man?


Curiously, searching on “Bruce Springsteen Iraq” in Google and setting the time parameter for the past month doesn’t bring up anything remotely relevant. But then, as Moe Lane writes, “I guess the Left is comfortable with our quiet troop buildup in Iraq:”

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Refreshing: despite my earlier sardonic commentary about Democrats rolling over on this, I still wondered whether we’d have more progressives protesting over this. Or rioting.  Guess even the most hardcore Lefty can detect a brick wall after he’s run into it six or seven times.

The United States has sent Apache attack helicopters to Iraq as part of the buildup in U.S. military personnel, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Officials would not say how many of the armed helicopters have been sent to the country, stating only that they will be based in Baghdad and could assist with evacuations of American personnel.

…Yes, I suppose that they could. Or they could be there for airstrikes against the terrorist army that Barack Obama unaccountably just let set up shop again in Iraq.

Of course, as long as Obama calls the troops “advisors,” perhaps anti-war celebrities think of them as managers and agents — they’ll get their 12 percent of the royalties from al-Maliki’s production company, but hopefully they want the points on the net, rather than the gross.

But in 1985, Springsteen was telling his listeners, “Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed,” before grunting his remake of Edwin Starr’s hoary-old 1969 Motown song “War, What Is it Good For.”* Last September though, Springsteen was cheerfully fundraising for Obama, even as Obama was saber-rattling in Syria. It got to the point where even left-leaning Buzzfeed created one of their patented listicles on “14 Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped.” As I wrote back then, BuzzFeed, astonishingly enough, put out an All-Points Bulletin, along with some exceedingly precious quotes as part of each celebrity’s “Last-Known Pre-2009 Communication” before these otherwise perilously outspoken far left celebrities voluntarily started BenSmithing themselves into oblivion:

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“I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.”
— Sheryl Crow

“I think we’re past that point in human evolution where there’s such a thing as winning wars.”
— Sean Penn

“It is very inspiring and amusing how many people have come out in this genuine and spontaneous way to embrace peace and reject war. It reminds us there is a human and gentle spirit out there in this world.”
— Tim Robbins

“American people always have to be tricked into going to war, they always have to be cajoled. I mean, there’s a long history of being lied to, of having things described in a particular way, in order to get them out of their sort of isolationist… prosperity mode and go to war.”
— Jackson Brown

“War is failure! When you are at war, you have failed!”
— Janeane Garofalo

And Janeane and failure are on exceedingly good terms. But she may have had the best explanation in 2003 as to why her fellow leftists gave Bill Clinton a pass during his myriad foreign adventures in the 1990s, and brought forward a decade to explain why Obama gets as a pass as well: “it wasn’t very hip.”

Last September, I did a few milk carton Photoshops of missing anti-war celebrities. Perhaps it’s time to crank out a few more. But then, as one of Moe’s commenters writes, “Don’t worry, antiwar protestors will become fashionable again as soon as the GOP wins the [White House].”

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Hipness and ideological consistency are quite cyclical things for celebrity anti-war leftists, apparently.

* Apparently borrowed from the first draft title of Tolstoy’s War and Peace

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