MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress are Partisan Fronts, not Antiwar Groups

My good friend John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and PR Watch, has been doing great work exposing the Center for American Progress and MoveOn.org for their support for (in the case of CAP) and silence regarding (in the case of MoveOn.org) Obama’s escalation of the war against Afghanistan.

In a piece titled, “How Obama Took Over the Peace Movement,” John writes:

CAP and the five million member liberal lobby group MoveOn were behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war. AAEI was operated by two of Barack Obama’s top political aids, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, and by Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change and USAction. Today Woodhouse is Obama’s Director of Communications and Research for the Democratic National Committee. He controls the massive email list called Obama for America composed of the many millions of people who gave money and love to the Democratic peace candidate and might be wondering what the heck he is up to in Afghanistan and Pakistan. MoveOn built its list by organizing vigils and ads for peace and by then supporting Obama for president; today it operates as a full-time cheerleader supporting Obama’s policy agenda.

While I agree with John, I think it is important to view this in a slightly different light.

I don’t think it is so much that Obama “took over” the peace movement as much as these groups are now fully exposed for the partisan fronts they actually are and have been for a long time…That they support Obama blindly on these belligerent foreign policies isn’t really a surprise. That’s how the duopoly operates.

It is really easy to be antiwar when someone like Bush is in power. Truly principled antiwar activists oppose wars when the guy they voted for is in power (or, more to the point, they don’t vote for candidates who want to escalate wars and rebrand—not end— occupations). I just think it is important to recognize the spinelessness of these groups that were only really “antiwar” when it was expedient to be so…