Snowy Day in Virginia; Jan 22, 2005

Cars In The Snow

On Friday, Washington got an inch of snow which was enough to jam the freeways with accidents. The Washington road net is a delicate thing which collapses when dusted with a little powdery white.

By the next day, a few inches of snow had fallen, covering these cars, which the owners had not even attempted to drive from the parking lot. They knew better. When it snows here, people leave for home immediately and if they are already home, they don't leave until they have to.

Driving in the snow.

When it snows, I like to drive around and see what's happenning, unlike the weather weenies of Washington. It looks a lot like this.

Flyboys; Chantilly, VA; Jan 20, 2005

Rick & Bruce

Rick, Bruce, and I flew mighty F-4E Phantoms at Clark Air Base in the Philippines way back when, before the nearby volcano erupted and covered the runways in thirty feet of ash.

Rick stayed in to fly Stealth fighters. Now he flies for JetBlue, passing through Dulles on a layover. Bruce is a computer geek like me out in Manassas.

Together we defended America against the Soviet menace. Not one commie bomber reached California while we were on the job, buddy.

Inauguration Parade; Jan 20, 2005, Washington, DC

I voted for Bush twice for governor in Texas, twice for President, and I was damned sure going to see him inaugurated when the events were only a Metro train ride away. The Federal government gave its employees in DC-land the day off, so that left we contractors to pretend we were working that day or take a vacation day. I took the day and scampered downtown.

If you don't know DC, here is an excellent map of Washington.

The actual inauguration took place at the Capitol at the top right of this map published in the Washington Post. At 2 PM, the inauguration parade was due to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, hanging a hard right at the Willard Hotel, then left to come out in front of the giant reviewing stands in front of the White House.

I was hoping to get good photos of protestors making fools of themselves and studied the lengthy list of planned demonstrations to picke the best one. ANSWER, the Stalinist front group, was doing their thing near the beginning of the route at the Capitol. They roughed me up during one of their peace marches, so I thought they were the kind of idiots likely to do something Big and Stupid. Where ever the biggest idiots are, that's where I want to be. It's like my credo.

But I saw that there would be a die-in at Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 12:30 PM, so I thought I'd catch the little idiots first and do the big idiots later.

That was The Plan.

Although it was Thursday, a week day, DC felt like a ghost town when I got off the Metro. Vehicle traffic was restricted in town. Nobody was on the sidewalks. Most of the businesses and restaurants were closed. It looks like the residents and business owners wrote off the day and left town. Even the street vendors took the day off. It was a little eerie. You never see DC that quiet except at night.

They must have run out of jersey barriers to block the streets because they used Metro buses to block off some. This one is not far from the White House.

"We Support The Troops. Bring Them Home Now."

I stumbled across this parade of pinheads and joined to see the fun. I have no illusions that lefty protestors support the troops, having a very clear recollection of the rage with which long haired numbskulls would insult my friends and I when they encountered us in uniform in public way back in the 1970s. They've trimmed their hair but they haven't changed their stripes. It's just a pose. They hate the military and anyone in it. If they really supported the troops, they wouldn't be using flag-draped coffins as props in their protest horror show.

A sexually frustrated Bush hater on the march. My recommendation for this poor young man is to go home and meet some nice girls, not protest chicks who carry copies of Das Kapital with them and are likely on a moment's notice to launch into a harangue on feminist resistance to patriarchal oppression. And take that poster of Che down from your wall, too. It scares the girls away. You'll feel better when you get a girlfriend. You won't want to march anywhere.

I'm always impressed by the intellectual arguments of the Democrat rocket scientists.

Repeating the Big Lie over and over again.

"Not Our President. No. Not In Our Name."

Of course, the Left doesn't accept the result of any election they don't win. They're not really committed to democracy, just to getting their way. But there's more to this sign than that. Notice at the bottom of it that it is a product of the organization, Not In Our Name, which originally opposed the US striking back at the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan after Sep 11.

Not In Our Name (NION) was started by C. Clark Kissinger, a Maoist and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Kissinger was a national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in his youth, then worked with the Black Panthers.

Kissinger objects to pretty much everything about America, saying, "The problem in this country [is] the oppressive system of capitalism that exploits people all over the world, that destroys our planet, that oppresses minority people, that sends people to the death chambers in droves. That is a problem that has to be done away with. Revolution is the solution. And the Revolutionary Worker has put out a call to people to join with them in formulating a new program for revolution in this country, a blueprint to go forward."

NION is a front organization which is buried in the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which in turn is buried in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a long-time Communist organization. All of them are officed in a building in New York City called the "Peace Pentagon," a haven for radical associations such as the War Resisters League, School of the Americas Watch, Nicaragua Solidarity Network, International Peace bureau, International Fellowship of Reconciliation, Coalition for Human Rights of Immigrants, et cetera. If you're pissed off at America, you can find a friend in the Peace Pentagon. Just follow the marijuana smoke belching out of the air vents.

Basically, NION is a revolutionary Communist group posing as pacifists. The fact that they oppose Bush makes me feel even better about voting for him.

I like the fact that they wear pink. That's truth in advertising.

Crocodile tears for the troops.

More confirmation that liberals are terrible at math.

Raging Grannies or raging idiots? You be the judge.

"Revolution. Why It's Necessary. Why It's Possible. What It's All About."

The call for revolution brings up the rear of the parade. Most of the major demonstrations in DC are run by front organizations for commies who think one day they are going to overturn the US and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Lincoln Bedroom. Yeah, it's goofy, but you never know. A failed art student can become Fuhrer. A chicken farmer can become head of the Gestapo. A drug addict can become head of the Luftwaffe. Sometimes, even crazy, bad, dangerous dreams come true.

St. John's Church.

This Episcopal church was a beehive of activity in the morning when President Bush and family went to services and offered up The Prayer Of Righteous Whoopass to God Almighty for prevailing over the Forces of Coastal Big City Darkness: "Thank you, Jesus, for putting that highfalootin rich-ass East Coast snob John Kerry in his place. Please smite all his henchmen hiding in the corners of newsrooms and universities of This Great Nation and place upon the New York Times a plague of boils. Amen."

OK, so that didn't really happen but it would have been OK if it did. By the time I got there, the presidential security bubble had long ago moved on.

St. John's is about a block away from the White House, with the open square of Lafayette Park between them. There were supposed to be all kinds of protestors holding a die-in at Lafayette Park, but it was all fenced off. You needed a ticket to get in, so that wasn't happenning for me.

There were no protestors to be found, so I pressed on. They showed up after I left and did their die-in on the street, a couple dozen of them pretending like they were casualties in Iraq. However, there weren't many people around to gawk at their Profoundly Significant Political Statement and the police could not be bothered to even give them a warning. The streets were closed so they weren't impeding any traffic. It got kinda cold lying there dead on the pavement. After an hour they just got up and slunk off.

St. John's Episcopal Church was built in 1815 just for the President and his family. President James Madison and every president since has attended services there. Its parish house, attached behind it, used to be the British Legation. Daniel Webster signed a treaty with the British in its parish house which defined the Canadian border.

Lafayette Park

Here's the view with my camera stuck through the fence. Normally, you could see the White House, which is holding up that flagpole. However, you can only see the back of the reviewing stands erected on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Hands Off Everything!

This sign just about sums up the protestors world view. She's got the material for half a dozen protests encapsulated on one sign. Whatever flavor of dictatorship you've got, secular tyranny in Saddam's Iraq, mad mullahs in Iran, commie blowhards in Cuba, or your everyday strongman killers in Haiti; she want them to stay in business. And leave those snail darters alone, too!

These are the same folks who complained that impeaching Clinton would unconstitutionally overturn the results of an election.

A line of cops on motorcycles, oddly enough, yawn and chuckle as the protestors pass instead of instituting the repression of the fascist police state the protestors claim they live in.

Sore Losers For Kerry!

More sexually frustrated losers.

Message To Loser On The Right: It doesn't matter how hot the Kerry or Bush girls are. You're not gonna be getting lucky with any of them.

Uncle Sam's Evil Twin.

Election Fraud, huh? What sore loser protestors like this don't understand is that the more they wail and cry and grieve about how they lost, the better it is for us. Hey, baby, how about recounting those ballots in Ohio again? Maybe it will come out in your favor this time.

Not.

Women For Peace

I love it when the protestors color coordinate. Pink neatly defines that intersection between feminism and communism and revolution.

Merriam-Webster definition of Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

Hmmm. Well, we aren't trying to destroy any racial or cultural group, but we are trying to destroy the Baathists, a political group. I call that a good thing. And Al Qaeda, another political group. Another good thing.

The bulk of the protestors were knucklehead twentysomethings, kids who have never run anything in their lives but are cocksure they can run everything better. There were high school students who rode in on buses from other states to play in the big protest party, college kids, and lots of underachievers in their twenties hoping to Do Something Important.

It wouldn't be a protest without drums. Lefty protestors LOVE drums.

Another lefty brought her bongo drum.

Maybe you're freezing because you're a knucklehead.

Ding Dong Bologna. This was the most sensible sign any protestor displayed.

Yeah, right. The troops LOVE President Bush. Impeaching him would really support them.

I get the feeling that these knuckleheads think they can say anything as long as they say "Support The Troops" first:

Support The Troops! Burn The White House!
Support The Troops! Join The Communist Revolution!
Support The Troops! Let The Iraqi Insurgents Win!

The violence slithers just below the surface for the Bush haters.

Quite a glib statement, yet old Benjamin thought the Revolutionary War a necessary thing to establish our liberty.

As Aristotle said, "We make war that we may live in peace."

John Stuart Mill identified states of peace worse than war: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

The wonderful thing about the world of protesting is that nothing needs to make sense. It just needs to sound good. If we were to pull out of Iraq, the war would not stop but would degenerate into civil war.

If the US was a police state, you'd think that it would be pretty easy for it to round up people like this. After all, they got a protest permit from the government, published their agenda in the paper and on the Internet, and have a squadron of police guarding their demonstration. It doesn't get easier to catch dissidents than that for opppressive governments. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

It's that other world the protestors are hoping for that worries me far more than the imaginary police state they think they are living in.

Another lefty sore loser.

Liberal word games.

Bogus coffins. Using military casualties as props.

Lefty rocket scientist. You can't help but wonder how these people think up all this brilliant stuff and then you see a guy like this and it all snaps into place.

You can have it any time you want. All you have to do is win an election.

The Line.

From a casual examination of the map it looked like most of the entrances to the parade route required tickets to enter specific viewing areas. Perhaps only a quarter were general admission entrances for casual observers like me. I got there about 12:45 PM for the 2 PM parade and the line was about a hundred yards long and getting longer by the minute.

The line to the inspection tent. It took about a half hour to reach the tent where a half dozen inspection stations were manned by the same TSA employees you see at the airport. You had to walk in fairly clean, no big bags or sticks or loose objects that could be thrown. They patted you down and looked at your cell phone (could be a grenade) and through your camera. It only took about ninety seconds.

They had to do this for the tens of thousands of people inside the two mile long fenced off parade route.

Once I got inside, I realized the parade route was sectioned off into cells. I couldn't walk down to the other end where the biggest idiots were. Fortunately, there were enough idiots spread through the crowd so that I wasn't disappointed.

The historic Willard Hotel.

The White House is only a block and a half left/west as the crow flies. This is where Lincoln checked in when he came to town to be president. It was also where General Grant checked in when Lincoln summoned him from the West to take command of the Union Army. Representatives of special interests wishing to dip their hands in Uncle Sam's pockets would lurk in the lobby of Willard during the Civil War in hopes of snagging meetings with public servants passing through. They came to be called lobbyists.

I picked my spot in Pershing Park, a little park right in front of the Willard that occupies the corner where the parade turns. I parked on the grassy knoll that gave me a good view over the heads of the crowd and on a corner where I could see the parade pass on two sides. It would probably slow at the corner, giving me a long look.

It's almost a law in DC that whenever I pick a good spot to take a photo the police shoo me away. They chased us all off the grass but I got a good spot on the steps anyway.

Standing in Pershing Park, the crowd looks west down Pennsylvania Avenue South for the inauguration parade to march up from the Capitol. We all think we only have an hour to wait. We are not even close. This is DC, baby. Nothing starts on time.

Policeman

Security was intense. There were policemen stationed on both sides of the street about a body length apart. They were drawn in from cities all over the region.

There were police wandering through the crowd and behind the crowd, too.

There were police on top of the buildings. Sniper teams, I read.

Here are some more police on top of the Willard. When I say the police were on top of the buildings, I mean they were on the top of every building on the parade route. Every building.

Above the parade route, a US Park Police helicopter constantly patrolled our section. Unseen off on the horizon flew F-16 fighters ready to intercept any aircraft with hostile intent. Up in the stratosphere somewhere circled an E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft to guide the fighters to any bogies. I just never thought I'd see the day when the Air Force would be CAPing (Combat Air Patrol) our own freaking capital. It's outrageous.

I know there were also radiation sensors in the crowd. There were undoubtedly lots of hidden sensors and defenses and teams of guys with guns ready to kick ass that nobody could see. All the defenses were run from a war room a dozen miles to the west in Fairfax, Virginia.

Bigots for Bush

Another sore loser looking for some other reason for losing other than "Kerry sucked."