Always nice to have a few touchstones outside your own standard orbit, in order to recalibrate yourself occasionally. Opposition to Bush and to the war in Iraq run so deep and so pure in Vermont that VDB can go weeks on end without encountering a single individual who supports either one.

It is only in that purified environment that questions about Peter Welch’s opposition to the War can arise, and linger. Which makes an anti-War touchstone like Russ Feingold even more crucial.

And last week Feingold’s Progressive Patriots Fund raised $20,000 to help re-elect twenty freshman members of Congress, “twenty freshman members of Congress who stood with me in my efforts to redeploy our troops out of Iraq, specifically voting for HR 2237, the McGovern Amendment.”

Feingold went on to tell Welch, “We need to re-elect you so you can continue to fight for issues about which we both care deeply.”

Understand, we’re not proposing some sort of absolute anti-War commutative principle: Feingold kicks ass on the War, Feingold contributes to Candidate X, therefore Candidate X kicks ass on the War.

But no one understands mere anti-War posturing better than Russ Feingold, and that’s the real point behind these Progressive Patriots contributions: not to pass on $1000, a drop in the direct-mail bucket, but to help authenticate the anti-War work being done by a small, effective group of first-term types.

More than cash, it’s Feingold’s seal of approval, on his signature issue.

Not a conversation-ending factoid or the final word on Welch’s anti-War work this session, but certainly no small potatoes neither.