Lamest protest ever

Concrete Bob hooked me up with a local protest/counterprotest between Move On dot Org and Dick Armey’s Freedom Works. I pretty much knew what was going to happen before I got there. It was going to be in Bethesda on Wisconsin Avenue which connects trendy, yuppie Bethesda with trendier, yuppier Georgetown. But it was much lamer than I could have imagined.

This guy was having more fun than I had.

The protest was supposed to be against the high price of gasoline, but true to their name, Move On moved the discussion on to a serious bout of BDS;

Accustomed to the tense stand offs and shouting matches between Code Pink and FReepers at the Israeli Embassy, the Sheepdogs and the Peace Vigil in West Chester. PA., this one was like a day in the park. See if you can spot the Freedom Works folks;

Or the Move On folks;

If Freedom Works hadn’t shown up, they wouldn’t have had enough people to hold the banner;

Basically, they walked from one gas station (the guy running it wasn’t Dick Cheney or George Bush – it was some African fellow and his wife) to another one up the street. Here’s video of the trip, if you’re really doing nothing tonight and you want to see what it looks like to walk south on Wisconsin Avenue ;

I’m pretty sure the photographers and strap hangers outnumbered the actual Move On activists. George Soros would pull his funding if he’d seen it. If all you can scrape together is a couple of geriatric hippies to hold your signs, why would you even have a protest? I don’t know who all of the goofballs dragging ass behind the protest, but they certainly weren’t interested in being identified with it. Raoul might know some of them from the pictures, though…or concretebob might know. I was ashamed to be seen taking time to photo it, so some of them were acting like they weren’t involved with it, too.

But Freedom Works turned out better numbers and more enthusiastic folks to counter the MoveOn “activists” (I’m pretty sure the Move On crowd were just herded out of a nearby nursing home and promised an extra pudding for holding the signs). Activists was probably too ambitious of a description, though.

As an aside, someone should alert Geoff Millard, the fellow from IVAW who claims that our troops are racists for referring to Iraqis as Hadjis…I found this carpet store on my way back to the car;

That kind of waters down his complaint doesn’t it?

Welcome, Freedom Works and Melanie Morgan readers.

Category: Politics, Protests/Rallies