Demagogue

Dear Kitty covers the wide variety of protests against Dubya's visit here last weekend, including a first-person account of the demonstration here in Amsterdam. My sense of the demo (which I couldn't attend) was that it resembled some of the big anti-war protests in the U.S. in early 2003: it represented and was supported by a large and not particularly radical bloc of the population, but fringe groups managed to take an important role in organizing it and some pretty nutty ideas were spouted from the platform, in signs, etc.

I watched the speeches by Dutch PM Balkenende and Bush at Margraten (the cemetery where American soldiers from WWII are buried). Dubya's was pretty generic and mostly unobjectionable; he tried only once to link the war in Iraq to the fight for freedom in WWII, and that was pretty much in passing.

My favorite tidbit: the sign at the A'dam demo saying "Jon Stewart for President."