War! What Is It Good For?

by Dick Mac

Edwin Starr's hit single "War" is one of the most famous anti-war songs of all-time.

Even people who are now tea-baggers can be found tapping their foot or nodding their head to the song when it plays on the radio. No other protest song has been so popular.

I thought of this song this morning when I saw a list of tweets by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) about the GOP War On Women.

Republicans and their apologists, the tea-baggers, insist that the GOP has made no concerted effort to curb the rights of women, or roll-back the progress women have made over the past four decades.

And these tea-baggers who have to work for a living, insist that they are not against women's rights, insist that their "conservatism" has nothing to do with abridging the rights of women, and that the entire dialog is a conspiracy of the liberal media.

Here's the list that Barbara Boxer tweeted:

• The GOP held hearings on women's health and the panel included no women.
• The GOP nearly shut-down the federal government over their efforts to defund family planning.
• GOP legislators in Virginia want to force women to undergo invasive medical procedures when they seek reproductive health care.
• The GOP has introduced more than thirty bills to limit women's reproductive health care.
• The GOP governor and legislature of Wisconsin repealed that state's Equal Pay law.
• The GOP has introduced 500 bills in various states to restrict women's access to health care.

The war on woman that tea-baggers and their masters in the GOP insist is a fallacy seems pretty real to me.

I guess all these working people who support the GOP have no wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. As the father of a daughter, the son of a mother, the brother of a sister and the husband of a wife, I am very concerned about this movement by the tea-baggers to limit women's access to health care.

This could be the issue that turns our political discourse into war.

But back to the song and the singer:

The biggest hit of his career, which cemented his reputation, was the Vietnam War protest song "War" (1970). Starr's intense vocals transformed a Temptations album track into a #1 chart success, which spent three weeks in the top position on the US Billboard charts, an anthem for the antiwar movement and a cultural milestone that continues to resound in movie soundtracks and hip hop music samples. It sold over three million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.[1] "War" appeared on both Starr's War and Peace album and its follow-up, Involved. Involved also featured another song of similar construction titled "Stop the War Now", which was a minor hit in its own right.

Edwin Starr, at wikipedia