Left Behind: Jacob Weisberg, in Slate, says that those fulminating about the supposedly inane or offensive comments of the anti-war left — he mentions Susan Sontag’s notorious New Yorker essay in the first paragraph — are missing the boat. There really is no serious anti-war left at the moment. Opposition to the war, he suggests, is confined to stalwart pacifists. those considered cranks even by the left, and “others whose ears hear only evil about the United States.” Even the American Friends Service Committee, he notes, concedes that the anti-war movement “is still in the process of taking shape.” Nothing like the Vietnam opposition, in which prominent intellectuals and radicals explicitly sided with our enemies, the better parallel is WWII, in which opposition sentiment was “marginal and idiosyncratic” … and scant.

Given its insignificance, the fixation of the supporters of the war on the opposition serves their own ulterior motives, which he goes on to explicate — in essence, since there is no serious anti-war movement, the patriots have had to invent one.

I recall blinking with relish to the item about Paul Krassner leading his audience in a rollicking chorus of a cherished obscenity last month in response to Cokie Roberts’ scurrilous, similar observation that there was no opposition that matters. Many of us who think we are earnest opponents of the war will be distressed at Weisberg’s comments, yet there’s something there we should take to heart. His sobering appraisal echoes my own concerns that dissent — to the war or the dramatic attack on our civil liberties that is its concomitant — is not massive or visible, not building up any momentum or impact. The majority of the thinking public does not read AlterNet, ConsortiumNews, tompaine.com or the left-leaning weblogs into which we pour our passion, largely for one another. We seem to be preaching only to the converted…