OPEN LETTER TO THE PETRAEUS PROTESTOR

A familiar face and voice. And I thought you'd given up all this civil disobedience mascara, and were changing your tactics in stopping the war to something more likely to succeed. Ah, but it's in your blood, it's an addiction, it's the pure joy and panoply of carnival. Admit it. Glad to hear from you, though, as always, my friend. For a hip internationalist you even dazzle this tragically unhip radical centrist. You may or may not be a HD Thoreau in modern drag, and I am certainly no RW Emerson, but I nevertheless feel that your enormous energies and intellectual fervor could be put to better use than that which I witness here.

Your response that you don't think that your public comment at a public hearing rose to the level of "civil disobedience", nor do you particularly care for carnival or spectacle, hardly seems a sincere analysis from over here in the cheap seats, especially after you voiced a frustration with living in a representative democracy rather than a participatory one, a comment which confirms that you comprehended the demarcation lines.

Yet, we do very much live in a representative form of democracy, a republic. The founding fathers were very clear about both points. I have watched this video many times. While Senator Carl Levin did pause, or stumble in his questioning of the General for a very brief moment, thus allowing for what you called "an opening", the proceedings were inarguably disrupted by your outburst.

And since you feel you were merely exercising your constitutional right of free speech, you must then also accept the judicial supposition that unless this "representational" aspect of our government is changed by constitutional amendment, you must surely accept the idea that any such public meeting, even the PTA, must operate under a rule of order.