George Bush came to my hometown. Well, almost. From August 22-24 he was in Idaho, and he spent the first two days in Donnelly, which is 11 miles south of McCall (where I’m from). We did get to house the presidential helicopter, Marine 1, in one of the hangars on our airstrip.

It isn’t quite accurate to say he spent time in Donnelly; rather, he spent his first two days fishing and mountain biking at the mega-posh Tamarack Resort facility located near Donnelly.

This was all happening in the midst of the political fallout he was suffering from the enduring presence of Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother of Casey Sheehan, a marine soldier who was killed in Iraq last year. She spent two weeks camped outside of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, asking to speak to the president and ask him why her son had to die. He did not grant her an audience; he was too busy clearing brush and attending Republican party fundraisers to be bothered with such things. She never got her few moments with him; he cut his vacation short by a whole two days to survey the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and she has gone on a protest tour of the U.S. that will end on Capitol Hill.

Whether or not you agree with Sheehan’s pleas to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, you have to wonder how the president could continue being so seemingly callous. It certainly wasn’t scoring him any points with the pollsters. At somewhere between 35 and 40%, public support in the war was at its lowest yet. It would have taken him all of thirty minutes to bring Cindy Sheehan inside and converse with her in private, but of course that would be some kind of admission that he made a mistake. And as we all know, being president means never having to say you’re sorry, at least in his eyes. Yes, he already spoke to her once before, but when she tried to get a response from him then he went tharn like a deer in headlights. At least this time he could have constructed a counter-argument and opened up a dialogue between the pro- and anti-war groups in this country.

But he didn’t, so instead of facing her he stayed in his ranch and went on a bike ride with Lance Armstrong. Then he got the hell out of Dodge and took a vacation from his vacation and traveled to Utah and Idaho, two of the most steadfastly red states in the union, where he knew he could surround himself with admirers. Although these speaking dates were like planned months in advance, one cannot help but marvel at their timeliness.

Even in Idaho, however, the president couldn’t find total support. On the evening of his arrival protesters staged a peace rally in Donnelly, and an anti-Bush rally the next night. In Boise two protests were held, followed by one in Nampa on the day of his speech. I went to the Donnelly rallies. I had three signs, in all. The best of them read, “Osama is to Saddam as Apples are to Oranges: They’re both fruity, and they have nothing to do with each other.” My intent was to spread information, not inflammatory language, something this administration has been all too willing to do.

Anti-war protestors get a lot of flak; some it is understandable. A lot of it is, at best, inconsiderate and, at worse, anathematic to the idea of democracy and diversity of opinion. We had plenty of people yelling to us that we weren’t changing anything, and even one of my friends who hates Bush did not bother to go to the demonstrations because it was, in his words, “like a monkey screaming into a hurricane.” But that’s missing the point. We didn’t expect Bush to change; we wanted to cast a light on things he’d rather not have us think about, and show him and the rest of the nation that even in the reddest states there are people who don’t agree with his policies.

Some people said using Bush’s visit to protest the war was disrespectful to the soldiers, but that’s absurd. No one, I repeat NO ONE is badmouthing the troops; they are just doing their jobs. We are criticizing the leadership, who lied about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in order to send our military into a war with insufficient troop levels and armor, did not plan for how to handle the power vacuum that opened up after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and now has no clearly defined exit strategy.

Finally, some have had the audacity to suggest that protesting the war gives aid and comfort to the terrorists. This has its roots in Bush’s September 20, 2001 address to the nation where he boldly proclaimed, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Such black-and-white thinking is a cornerstone of the fundamentalist ideology we’re supposed to be fighting in this war and has no place in a free society. Besides that, the idea that the Islamic fundamentalists would be looking to us, the Great Satan, for encouragement is ridiculous. If you’re looking for someone to blame for egging them on, look no further than our own president, who, when told about the possibility of an increasing insurgency in the early days of the war, said they should “bring ‘em on.” So much for supporting the troops.

For the record, I don’t agree with those who say we need to pull out of Iraq immediately. We created the whole mess, and it’s up to us to clean it up. Like the old adage says, “You break it, you bought it.” It’s obvious the Iraqi military is ill-equipped to function on its own. With that said, however, I think we need a change in leadership (i.e. Rumsfeld) and tactics. Leveling Fallujah and Najaf has done nothing to quell the insurgency; on the contrary, many of the cities we reclaim end up being retaken after our forces leave the area. The War on Terrorism (sorry, I mean the International Struggle Against Violent Extremism) is not a war of conventional weapons, it’s a war of ideas. The best sign I saw at the two rallies I went to read, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.” Until we understand there’s no such thing as ‘coercive diplomacy,’ we will win plenty of battles, but we will never win over the hearts and minds of the people.