Look Where They Came From 

Ann Althouse is having a hard time deciding which protestors in Lebanon to believe:

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to marginalize yesterday's big protests, but you can't -- like Clinton -- just ignore them if you want to count the other demonstrations to mean something, and it's not enough to say they people aren't so pretty.

I think it's pretty obvious which protests are more believable in Lebanon. You have one group of people who were shouting pro-Lebonese slogans, asking simply that they determine their own destiny. Then you have a second group of people shouting slogans for an entirely different country, who were from that country:

Imad Moustapha, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, bristled yesterday when CNN's Wolf Blitzer suggested the protest was orchestrated by Syria, saying Syria "doesn't have a single soldier in Beirut."

In fact, thousands of Syrians attended the Beirut rally, many of them spirited across the border in buses. But the stage-managing efforts of Damascus accounted for only a fraction of the enormous turnout, diplomatic sources in the Syrian capital told the Toronto Star's Mitch Potter.

Only a fraction of the turnout? I'm sure that's true. Why bother busing any Syrians into the rally at all? Saying that the Pro-Syrian protest had any meaning is like saying that a KKK rally in support of slavery where clansmen paint their faces black shows that African Americans support slavery. It's ludicrous.

This has nothing to do with which side looked prettier... it has everything to do with which side of the border these people live on.