#(with all the caveats that trying to poll ppl in russia entails rn)

[tanadrin]

The You’re Wrong About episode on the Dixie Chicks reminded me of something I was really only half-aware of in 2003; I was in my mid-teens, thought the Iraq War was a bad idea, but for reasons I had a lot of trouble articulating, and I won’t claim that my position was super well thought out or nuanced (though the passage of time did vindicate it). But the level of support for Bush in that era, and the bipartisan support for the war, was truly insanely high; Natalie Maines’ very mild rebuke of Bush, in terms of political discourse nowadays, prompted the entire country to basically go apeshit on her, for the band to temporarily become pariahs, and for some pundits to seriously suggest that criticizing the president on a London stage amounted to actual treason. Given the egregious transgression of international law the Iraq War represented, the transparent deception used to justify it, and the absolute disaster it proved to be for the people of Iraq, it is easy to forget just how rabidly pro-war the whole country was at that time. And this is in a country that is relatively prosperous, has a pretty free press, a two-party system, and had only spent a couple of years being terrorized by propaganda about the People Coming To Get You.