Numbers and the mistake

OK, my background is mathematics and engineering. Sometimes I'm fascinated by the way numbers and statistics will help to illustrate or just plain see a pattern. Yeah, I know numbers and statistics can lie. But sometimes they can be very interesting.

Bill Quiqley, in a piece up on Znet gives numbers compiled by a magazine called Nuclear Resister on the number of anti-war arrests by year.
Since 2002, the NUCLEAR RESISTER has documented anti-war arrests for protestors each year:

2002 - 1800 arrests
2003 6072 arrests
2004 2440 arrests
2005 975 arrests
2006 950 arrests
2007 2272 arrests
2008 810 as of May 1

To me, this pattern, and the fact that the was is still continuing, shows the mistake the anti-war movement has made. One way to look at these numbers is to say that the number of CD arrests by antiwar protesters dropped at the time of the Kerry campaign in 2004. And they stayed down through the 2006 elections, only to start climbing afterwards.

The anti-war movement essentially committed itself to the Democratic Party over this time. They backed the Kerry campaign, didn't support an independent, and seemed to deliberately back off any independent action in that time. This seemed to both kill the momentum of the antiwar movement, and it silently delivered a message that working in politics to back Democrat was the answer.

The number stayed low through the 2006 election. Then it starts to rise again. And surely it starts to rise because the anti-war movement was figuring out that having the Democrats in power in Congress meant nothing to end the war because the Democratic leadership supports the war.

To me, the numbers after 2006 are encouraging. It shows a movement waking up from a delusion that the Democrats were the answer.

Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership is about to ensure passage of a war funding bill that fully funds the Iraq war into 2009 (at a cost of something like over a $160 billion). And they have taken any impeachment acts for lying the nation into war completely 'off the table'. Perhaps that was always a pun too since the mechanism to bury Rep. Kucinich impeachment resolutions is called 'tabling'.