Code Pink's 'truths' just cheap sloganeering

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The members of Code Pink who descend on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center each Friday purport to know the truths governing the foreign policy of the Bush administration, although theirs are the kind of truths spun in the dark recesses of Oliver Stone's mind.

They are a cartoonlike series of messages made out of the same old cloth, from the "lies" of the administration to the all-powerful influence of Halliburton. These charges are in the family of "No blood for oil," which, as we all know, never resulted in dollar-a-gallon gas.

The latter was one of the theories going into the presidential election last November, that a steep drop in the price of gasoline would abet the re-election prospects of President Bush. That blood-for-oil decline at the gas pump never came to pass, and it seems laughable today as a gallon of gas climbs to the $3 mark, and threatens to go higher in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastating toll on the Gulf states and energy production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Members of the Code Pink claim to be aiding the convalescing soldiers at Walter Reed, however weak the claim is, if insisting their sacrifices have nothing to do with protecting us from those who mean us harm and everything to do with enriching the pockets of a few.

The Code Pink types are certain to become more omnipresent in our city in the weeks ahead, with the haunted Cindy Sheehan making her way to the nation's capital by bus, culminating in an anti-war rally Sept. 24.

Code Pink and the like-minded have a right to say whatever they like, of course, just as the rest of us have the same right, and we all can agree to disagree, if necessary. Yet the Code Pink types add insult to the injury with the intellectually empty notion that they support the troops, just not the cause.

The tortured application is empowering news to Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who are engaging our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this is Code Pink's definition of support, our soldiers undoubtedly would prefer no support at all.

This pathological need to be heard, a hard-earned quality of America, also taxes the resources of a city already overburdened by the ever-increasing demands of security. Ours is a city forever being required to play baby sitter to these self-appointed dispensers of a higher truth.

We remain on bin Laden's hit list, in case anyone has forgotten September 11, 2001. The uneasy sense is not lost on city officials, who promptly increased security measures around the entry points of the Metro system after the London transit-system bombings.

The grizzled peaceniks of the Vietnam era are swinging into action, too, clinging to their parallel vision of then and now, as if the terrorists' repeated attacks on U.S. interests abroad and September 11 have been purged from their aging minds.