HERE’S MORE EVIDENCE (er, well, actually it’s just some evidence, since my snarky comments below don’t count) that antiwar protests actually increase support for war:

“Some people have their minds made up, but many people are still uninformed,” said Veronica Marks, a fourth-year sociology student and anti-war activist who attended the last two San Francisco demonstrations.

Marks protests to combat what she sees as a biased media and to let people know Bush is a “tyrant.”

But according to a study by political science graduate student Phil Gussin, the opinions of people who conditionally supported war changed toward favoring war when shown photographs of Bush and then of anti-war demonstrators.

“If anti-war demonstrators are trying to gather support by having their pictures shown, they are having the opposite effect,” Gussin said.

Subjects who were shown pictures of the president had a seven percent higher approval rating for Bush compared to those who were shown other, non-political pictures, Gussin said. Subjects shown pictures of Bush and anti-war photographs had a 15 percent higher approval rating than the control group, Gussin said.

I seem to recall Eric Alterman alluding to similar research from the Vietnam era, but I can’t find the link.

(Via Russell Wardlow).

UPDATE: I like this one though.