Anti-war activist Rabbi Lerner releases private call transcript

The Politico: Anti-war leaders stymied, frustrated
By: Mike Allen
Sep 9, 2007

A well-known anti-war leader has gone public with the transcript of a private conference call that shows peace activists are exasperated with the Democratic congressional leadership and at a loss for a long-term strategy....

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Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, posted the transcript Friday on the website of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, of which he is a co-chair. The transcript shows that opponents of the war in Iraq plan to try to convince freshman Democrats from conservative districts that they might not get reelected unless the party produces something serious in the way of resistance to the war. But the call shows the war opponents are having little success because of fears about the impact on next year’s elections if the party is seen as defeatist.

The call, which Lerner titled “Strategizing With Leaders of the Anti-War Movement,” included two sympathetic members of Congress and representatives of groups ranging from Code Pink to the Progressive Democrats of America. Lerner — who is based in Berkeley, Calif., and is a leader of what he calls “the religious left” — told Politico in a phone interview on Sunday that he concluded from the call that the anti-war movement does not have a long-term strategy, even though the war “is going to continue through the end of President Bush’s administration” and perhaps into the term of the next president.

"A central point that the spiritual progressives are trying to make to the secular progressives is this: People in the U.S. are opposed to the war, but they feel that they need to have a picture of what the world would look like if the U.S. were to withdraw from the world by leaving Iraq," Lerner said. Lerner said he posted the transcript in an effort to convince war opponents that they need “some fundamentally new thinking.”

“Right now, we could write the story of this Congress as ‘Profiles in Cowardice,’” Lerner said. “There’s a great deal of frustration with the Democrats in the Congress – a sense almost of betrayal....

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5723.html

after everyone busted their ass in 2006, this is what we get.

Effort and money down the drain!