This is a photo from yesterday’s “march on Washington” by what are laughing called “conservatives” these days.
So, here’s my question. See the guy on the right with the Benjamin Franklin quote?
Where the hell was his protest during the Bush administration?
Meanwhile, I’m laughing out loud at the assertion by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R, of course, TN) who said that the attendance at the protest was so high — 1.5 million — that the highways around DC had been closed. Having lived my entire life in DC, let me tell you – it would have to be something like 10 million people to close, say, the Beltway, and even that seems farfetched. The reality (something that today’s conservatives have little interest in or knowledge of) is that there were probably closer to 60,000 people… less than the capacity of tiny little Disneyland in California. A world of fantasy, indeed.
Alex Koppleman’s report from the scene:
…a young woman who declined to give her name pulled me aside.
“I just wanted to let you know there are some normal people here to protest government spending,” she said. Identifying herself as part of a local chapter of the College Republicans, she added, “We’re not all nuts. I just wanted to let you know that.”
She was right, too. Not everyone at the protest was “nuts,” not by a long shot.
There was Linda Raileanu, for instance, who carried a sign reading “Nurses against Obamacare.” A registered nurse who told Salon she had more than 20 years of experience working, in part, in Philadelphia hospitals, Raileanu said she was there because she worked with physicians and nurses who were against the Democratic proposals for healthcare reform and were “very upset Obama’s giving the perception we’re for it.” She wanted to represent them, she said. But she did participate in that alternate reality a bit. Though she’d worked to provide end-of-life counseling, she told Salon she was against the provisions in the bills going through Congress that would provide coverage for people who choose to receive such counseling because she believed it should be done by professionals, not bureaucrats. (No bureaucrats would be involved in the actual consultation.)
But there were certainly a lot of people there who seemed like they’d fall under the “nuts” category, at least by the College Republican’s standards. There was one with a sign that asked, “Whose spirit is in the White House?” and included photos of Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Obama. Another sign borrowed the Joker Obama poster that’s gotten a few minutes of fame recently, adding a Hitler mustache to the president’s face; underneath the image were the words “Obamacare is Eugenics.” One man held a sign reading, “Transparent? I see through your socialist lies, fool.” Each o in “fool” had been formed by the Obama logo.
And there was the other woman who pulled me aside. She had come down from Germantown, Pa., she told me, but she, too, declined to give her name — for fear of Obama’s “snitches,” she explained.
“I studied Nazi Germany, I read the story of how they took over,” she told me. “From the very beginning I heard it with Obama … I’ve studied the camps. That’s why people are here, because they’re afraid of the death camps that are coming.” The woman also said she believed liberals had “voted for a hijacker … voted for al-Qaida,” but said she understood, because they hadn’t known, and she was ready to forgive them if they woke up to the situation.
The atmosphere and the slogans were, in places, extreme enough that four liberals who’d come to parody the protesters were having no trouble slipping in unnoticed, even cheered. This despite the four — Jack Neville, Julian Brunner, Tushara Ekanayake and Marina France — carrying signs like one that read “A whole lot of white people here today” and another that asked “Where’s the proof?” and showed an image of Obama’s certification of live birth. Ekanayake’s sign warned of gay Muslims — it should have been a tip-off, except that he was also carrying a photo of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the Republican Party, and telling people he was Jindal’s nephew. That, he said, had allayed suspicion.
“It’s such an example of group think,” France said of the crowd at the rally. She made a good case, too, pointing out yet another way in which the reality on the Mall Saturday differed from the one beyond it. One of the more popular themes in protesters’ signs was a theme Beck has been harping on lately, the alleged proliferation of so-called “czars” like the drug czar in the Obama administration. Many of those signs linked the presence of those czars to Communism — it was unclear if any of the protesters holding them were aware of the real history of Russia, in which the Communists overthrew and replaced the czars.
Every one of these protestors is actually a few years late — the things they’re saying would have been much more understandable if directed at the Bush administration.
