I know it’s hard to keep track of all the things wingnuts are outraged about, so most corrente readers may have forgotten about this one if it ever crossed their radars in the first place. But back in 2004, this was briefly a very big deal: a bunch of peaceniks in Nelson, BC actually had the unmitigated gall to announce plans for a “draft resister memorial” honoring the Americans who took refuge in Canada rather than kill for LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam. O’Reilly called for a boycott of this sleepy (some would say stoned) little ski town of 10,000 inhabitants, and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders did their patriotic duty by carpet bombing the town’s website with angry emails pledging never to visit this place they’d never heard of before. More seriously, some veterans groups took offense and pledged to protest the gathering if it ever survived the Keyboarders’ fearsome firepower. I blogged about it at the time here.

Shortly thereafter we moved here.

What a difference a quagmire makes. Back then we were still turning corners (capturing Saddam’s third cousin once removed) and seeing lights at the end of nonexistent tunnels (Iraqis will vote for Ahmed Chalabi, AEI will broker peace with Israel, and Iran will beg for mercy). Democrats to a man were not to be trusted with weaponry of any kind. Now, not so much…. Even so, the speading violence grinds on, chaos being the one thing this Administration is good at.

So it’s with a feeling akin to watching a crocus pop up through thawing ground that I am pleased to note that the Our Way Home Reunion has survived the slings and arrows of O’Reilly & Co., and will go on as planned this June, with a slight change of venue. Featured speakers will include George McGovern, Tom Hayden, Michael Lerner, Arun Gandhi, and Kim Phuc, whose naked, napalm-scarred body remains the iconic image of that earlier evil enterprise, one that we apparently didn’t learn enough from. And since no peacenik gathering would be complete without music, there will be that, too.

Oh, and in a distasteful display of reality-based diplomacy, the veterans who once planned to protest the event have now agreed to participate in it instead. I’m sure this is the rankest form of appeasement. If this kind of thing were to spread, next thing you know, everyone will be doing it. As a famous person once said, war is over if you want it.

So if non-troll readers are looking for a good way to spend part of their summer vaction, you could do a lot worse than spend 4 days in one of the most beautiful places on earth, surrounded by other people who were right about opposing this war before our liberal-hawk betters made it legal (but not retroactively). I was going to add that you can count on no one asking you to defend Harry Belafonte, but then I realized that Britt Hume and the rest of the Convent of the Perpetually Wrong are almost guaranteed to be there, tallying up birkentstocks and sniffing for hackey sacks. Every picnic attracts ants.

But one thing you can be sure of: O’Reilly won’t be able to cut our mike.