I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears, but Andy Rooney said it right there on my TV. I had to pinch myself.

Andy spoke out forcefully against the war in Iraq:

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States, our United States, is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Andy Rooney is about as mainstream as it gets, so when he speaks out so unequivocally on an issue, even if he gets the number of dead troops wrong, it really means something.

It’s hard to establish Rooney’s popularity, but I doubt a network like CBS, which has to fight it out in the ratings market, would keep Rooney on if he weren’t popular. During a three-month suspension of Rooney from CBS’s 60 Minutes in 1990 due to unfortunate comments Rooney made about gays, the popular news show’s ratings plummeted. When Rooney was reinstated, due largely to a massive letter-writing campaign, the show’s ratings soared once again. Over the years Rooney has been in trouble over many controversial comments about women, blacks, and other groups.

One thing’s for sure: Rooney is not popular among the wing-nut Righties. Freepers clearly don’t think much of him if the 245 responses posted on the Free Republic website to the Rooney editorial “Our Soldiers Aren’t Heroes” are any indication. One posting quotes Psalms 31:18: “‘Let the lying lips be put to silence; which speak grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous.’ Lord shut the mouth of this lying demon from the pit of hell!!” For this, Andy surely earns a badge of courage.

Despite Rooney’s political incorrectness -- or perhaps because of it -- Rooney is quite popular with moderates on both the Right and the Left, and that is where the outcome of Bush’s war is likely to be determined. 60 Minutes is the longest running TV show of any kind and it is perennially among the highest rated. It is the highest rated TV news magazine. So when Rooney is on, a large and diverse audience watches and listens. It is big.

Rooney ends his commentary by invoking President Eisenhower’s farewell speech (January 17, 1961) in which the former general warns of the coming of the “military-industrial complex.” Rooney included a video of the very first president of my memory saying, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Eisenhower was of course a Republican, and his ideas -- particularly since they came from the general who led the Normandy Invasion that culminated with the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II -- serve to remind Republicans of their greatest values: small government and staying out of the affairs of other nations unless there is just and real cause to do otherwise, as there clearly was not for invading Iraq.

The Bush junta has of course played up the fears caused by 9-11 to serve Republicans’ worst values: greed, selfishness, and bellicosity. The government has become more bloated, meddlesome, and corrupt under current Republican leadership. It is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich; who use war and fear to feed like vultures off the supine corpses of Uncle Sam, the American taxpayer, and especially the unfortunate people who inhabit the Third World nations the U.S. chooses to bully.

Eisenhower’s speech is a powerful and prophetic. We need to be shown this speech again and again and again to remind us how low we have sunk in the last 45 years.

One would like to see Rooney go further and admonish his large audience that our nation could make just as much money by making peace instead of war -- in a sort of New Deal for the whole planet -- by spending taxpayers’ money and thus improving our economy and employment by helping other nations instead of attacking them. Would taxpayers go for it as they did for the war in Iraq? I hope so, but I doubt it. Oh well, of such stuff dreams are made.

But dreams aside, Rooney took a risk, and he deserves credit.

Thank you again, Andy Rooney.