If you live in the DC metro area, you probably shout “amen” to my missives about motorcades, which have become an order of magnitude worse in the current administration.
Here’s another example of the unique relationship Republicans have to the law — you know, the way they think that they are above it?
This morning, in heavy traffic on a Potomac river bridge, I passed yet another SUV with a Bush bumper sticker. (They’re always SUVs, it seems.) Then suddenly, I heard a strange siren somewhere behind me. It sounded odd, not quite… “official.” I didn’t see anything, so I kept moving forward bit by bit with the traffic — and then a junky SUV pushed his way past the car beside me, followed by a banged up, nondescript beige sedan — looked like a Camry or Corolla — and then that Bush-boosting SUV. The lead SUV had one of those faux siren and light rigs in his front window, the kind you buy from specialty catalogs with the intent of impressing or intimidating other drivers.
I didn’t move over. My attitude to the whole thing was, “You have no power here! Be gone! Before someone drops a house on you.”
The lead guy turned off the lights and siren pretty quickly, he just used them to intimidate people into yielding to him on the bridge, but he didn’t get very far.
Around the corner, he and his two followers decided that they were in the wrong lane, and without the siren, they all crossed three lanes of traffic — at speed — and cut off all the other drivers to make it to the left lane… where they then stopped.
I went around them and continued on my way, alternately fuming and wondering why they were such idiots.
I often see large cars around here where the drivers have placed fake lights in the rear window — sometimes nothing more than red and blue cutouts that they think look like lights. I assume that they are either trying to intimidate other drivers, or convince police that they are comrades, thereby evading tickets. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone create their own motorcade.