CODEPINK?

E-mails, we get e-mails. Including Gerri who is just "too offended for words" by the attacks on CODEPINK that "you have all launched." Gerri, if we'd launched an attack, it would be blistering. We haven't done that as yet. In some roundtable, that Gerri doesn't reference and says is "from months ago," one of us (Gerri doesn't say who) reportedly referred to CODEPINK as "CODESTINK" and "now I find that all over the place online." We don't have the time to search the archives so we'll allow Gerri's charge to stand for this article only: We invented "CODESTINK"! Who knew?



The reality is that 2008 is an election year and CODEPINK provided a lot of cover for John Kerry in 2004. The reality is that Medea Benjamin's a Green but, for some strange reason, argued at the 2004 Green Party convention that her party shouldn't run a national campaign, that they should instead run a "safe-state strategy." As John Nichols noted ("Nader Loses the Greens," The Nation, July 19/26 2004, page five), Benjamin felt that would "help defeat Bush and grow the Greens." That was a bad strategy and since Gerri declares herself to be a Green, she might want to use her own power to insist that Medea Benjamin either advocate for a 50-state strategy or declare herself a Democrat in 2008. We think that would help the Green Party.



Gerri, if we had a war on CODEPINK, they wouldn't be on our links still. CODEPINK is linked to by nearly all sites. Marcia started her site this year and sees no reason to link to it (Marcia: "I think they're a DC lobbying group far from their roots and after the easy attention. For example, they skipped out on a veterans' healthcare hearing last month to again confront Condi Rice at a hearing. They offer repeats but I wasn't aware that the writers strike extended to activists.") If we had no reason to support CODEPINK, they wouldn't be linked to. We've been tidying up our links (ditching losers) and will continue to do so. When CODEPINK vanishes from our links, then you can write us about our war on them. Until then, stop wasting our time.