I had to be a couple blocks from the White House and took the metro in. One-track from Pentagon City. We got off at L'Enfant, changed to another line and got off at Farragut West, figuring that Foggy Bottom would be packed full of communists. We'd already seen them with incoherent signs on the trains, many homemade signs. Looked like the usual suspects, frankly - unwashed, ugly fat girls with bandannas over their hair like field workers in an imaginary socialist country full of punk rock...ugly fat girls.
I wondered where Martin Sheen was. Probably crying and wracked with guilt.
We took a break for lunch later on Saturday and could hear the rhythmic whining from where we were (F street). Walked over, three clean-cut guys, one a former Marine, to get as close as we could to http://www.ar15.com/the Ellipse. (I had joked about bringing a rifle and wondering if there was a daily limit on idiots, and he offered to spot for me). Nothing doing. Police were turning people away at the gate near DAR Hall.
We chitchatted with one of the cops, interrupted when he shouted commands to the communists to not hop the barricades. "Those chicks down there, they're all dirty and don't wash," he said. "Now, the right-to-life marchers, they've got some good looking women! But these people just smell." He lived in Virginia - "wayyyy out in Virginia," he said.
Observed walking back: a sign asking "WHAT WOULD JESUS BOMB?!" (The Marine replied "He would have bombed Saddam Hussein's murderous regime!")
Later in the evening we ran out for dinner at a Thai place on Penn and saw more of the communists, their signs rolled up, eating outside. Evidently the Revolution now takes VISA and Mastercard. Lots of anti-capitalism and Zapatista t-shirts, but I did not spot a single Che shirt. Or a single attractive communist woman: the younger ones were fat, pale, and 'skanky,' for lack of a better word, and all the others had the washed-out look common to those in the peace movement; I think this is caused by a lack of red meat.
We were disappointed as we figured that the best way to meet commie girls (had we wanted to) would have been to feign caring about their issues. (My father told me that a lot of men admitted going to Viet Nam era protests just to get laid). "I care so much about those Iraqi children, too!" (Blinks eyes). We figured we needed a gimmick T-shirt and settled on the most outrageous one we could think of:
TRANSGENDERED VETERANS FOR PEACE
(on the back: "change genders, not regimes!")
The sad thing is that we actually do care about those Iraqi children - we give a damn. That's why we know it is better for them to live in freedom, even it it is hard getting there. The communists care about feeling morally superior or assuaging their own feelings of white liberal guilt. (Great books on the topic - Camus' 'The Fall' and Hoffer's "True Believer."
I think I hear Martin Sheen crying somewhere.