Yesterday there was an anti-war-in-Afghanistan protest outside the White House, even the loonies in the anti-war movement realize the futility of protesting a successful war, but it didn’t make national news. There was a story to be told, it just was not the story the media had an interest in telling.

The protesters met Monday morning in McPherson Square, a slab of grass in downtown Washington named after a war hero. They had hoped to fill the park, but instead 176 protesters gathered in one corner. The crowd was all familiar faces from the antiwar movement, except for a homeless man sleeping on a bench, a bicyclist eating a scone and a Street Sense newspaper salesman who saw a business opportunity in the gathering.

If there was ever any doubt that the anti-war movement was nothing more or less than an adjunct of the Democrat party, that doubt has been swept away. One would think that with the war in Afghanistan at a critical stage and the administration drunkenly reeling from strategy to strategy apparently in search of a magic elixir or silver bullet that will make the war just go away that the anti-war movement would have been in fine form. If there was ever a time when their presence might have actually made a policy difference this was it.

However, now that Obama is in the White House the anti-war movement is curiously silent. The noxious Code Pink organization which was more than willing to consign 25 million Iraqis to rule by al Qaeda has decided that the war in Afghanistan, also against al Qaeda, doesn’t require an immediate withdrawal (h/t, Gateway Pundit):

“We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,” says Benjamin. “That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left the country, would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.”

The evidence is in and it is damning.

The anti-war movement we were afflicted with over the past eight years was essentially a rent-a-mob that never had any larger objective than damaging President Bush. The outrage about the war in Iraq was driven not by any opposition to war, itself, but by the hatred President Bush attracted by refusing to let Al Gore steal the 2000 election. The internal contradiction so glaringly apparent in the movement, that of supposedly being against war while supporting a genocidal madman as the ruler of Iraq, is easily explicable when you view that movement as nothing more than street theater designed to weaken the president.

While the Washington Post covers the protest with a bit of amusing snark they miss the larger picture by not examining why the anti-war movement has evaporated with a Democrat in the White House and what it says about a political party that is perfectly willing to sacrifice American blood, treasure, and national security interests for electoral advantage.