(Gorgeous) Arms Against the War Machine!

Ask even the most self-respecting left-winger, and they’ll admit that there’s not a lot of sex appeal to “the movement.” Protests against the war tend to attract more grey-haired, non-gym bodied types in ugly shoes and smelling of garlic and patchouli.

Based on a flurry of web postings today around the protests during the Gonzalez hearings, that may be changing. Case in point is the young man above, Adam Kokesh, a veteran and student at Claremont McKenna College in southern California. Code Pink (great group, though characteristically not high on the sex appeal index) joined forces with young Adam above showing the number of times Gonzalez used the term “I don’t know” during his testimony. Gotta admit the first thing I looked at was not what Adam was holding but what was holding the signs.

Praise be to Joe.My.God and new blog discovery Sparklepony for introducing me to Adam. And you can hear Adam in his own words here. He dresses up well too! Poof, just like that, suddenly the movement just got 10 times more sex appeal. Thanks to you, Adam, I may take those MoveOn messages out of my spam box!

At the Risk of Restating the Obvious -- SDS Now

JunkThief had held off mentioning them earlier, but after randomly weaving the new SDS into a conversation yesterday with Friedatella, we at JunkThief were amazed to realize Friendatella was unaware of the revived SDS. And Friendatella is usually so with it and was there...then...and here now.

So we felt obliged to make folks aware that last year the SDS made a much needed comeback with strong roots with their ancestors, as evidenced in their website. It's encouraging to know that they include not just the usual suspects of the campuses of Columbia and UC Berkeley, but also spots in Alabama, Illinois and elsewhere in the heartland (about 200 miles northeast of the spleenland). Oh, maybe there really is hope.

Watching Half Nelson the other night and seeing a 20-something teacher spewing similar politics in an inner city school was equally encouraging. At first the JunkThief gang was a bit concerned that there was not enough explanation of how this committed, articulate socialist ended up a crack addict. Try to hold to those values and live in the year in 2007, and you pretty much have to have a crack addiction to survive. All the same, seeing first Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson and then yesterday's discovery of Adam Kokesh, makes folks at JunkThief wonder if the new left hired a Madison Avenue to sex up the movement. Maybe they learned their lesson after that media blitz with Michael Moore in a Speedo.

There is a great article in the recent New York magazine about this larger movement that includes the Socialists on the campus of Columbia that so upset the dreaded Matt Sanchez. Matt Sanchez? You remember him, the forgotten flavor of last month.

What may take some folks a while to wrap their heads around is that today's SDS members were born just before or during the Bush I administration and are probably too young to remember the First Gulf War.