Gathering of Eagles vs Moonbats (Updates)

UPDATES: As I sift through my photos, videos and other blogs, I’ve been updating this post since this morning. Just scroll through and you’ll see. Whew! I think I’m done. Enjoy!

Editor’s Note: If you don’t see the photos, it’s because your system is behind a WebSense internet filter and it blocks Photobucket.

Well, not unlike the stupid hippies that they are, they were HOURS late. They were supposed to start at noon, but they didn’t get to the Capitol until 3 pm. While we were among them at Lafayette Park, one of the event organizers complained over the loudspeakers that people were having trouble showing up because, mysteriously, Metro had shut down the Blue and Orange Lines (from Virginia and GW University) so they weren’t going to kick off until one o’clock.

But my friend had arrived moments before on the Blue Line from Virginia – it hadn’t been shut down – so another moonbat lie.We figured they were making excuses for their pitiful numbers.

By the time they got to the Capitol, the general consensus was that they had less than 4,000 people, there were rumors of only 2,000 – but I’m pretty sure there were more than that. Most of them were moving towards Union Station before the die-in started, so their numbers shrank by about half within 20 minutes of their arrival at the Capitol. In a city of a 1/2 million where a good 10% are college students with little to do on a Saturday afternoon the first few weeks of the semester, a few thousand is a pretty shabby turnout.

This first picture is an upside down flag in Lafayette Park. But they still love this country, right? But the remarkable thing about it (and it wasn’t the only upside down flag) is that all of the flags the moonbats carried through the march were right-side up. So that tells me that someone made a conscious effort to tell all of the upside down flag guys to right their flags – and you know it was for their image, not because of their ideology;

Another of the upside down flags in front of the White House that mysteriously righted itself before the march;

Robin from Chickenhawk Express asked me to get photos of folks in uniform, so here’s one;

An Arty officer from the 24th Division – I’m pretty sure the 24th Division was inactivated before President Bush became president – so he’s making a vacuous point.

This fellow has more money than brains – he’s way too old to have been issued that uniform by the Army;

And this Veterans For Peace stuff really cheeses me off. It hints that I’m a Veteran For War because I don’t belong to their testoterone-deficient organization. I’m not “for” war – I’m “for” national security and given the current enemy, war is the only answer. If you think war isn’t the answer, you didn’t understand the question.

And by the looks of his scraggly ass, he was probably a chapter case anyway.

If you don’t have a uniform to wear to the event, well, just wear your yacht skipper’s hat;

Too many signs and not enough moonbats;

This guy stalked me until I took his picture, so it should make him happy that he made the blog;

I guess he’s madder at Israel than he is at Bush. But, if you wanted to take a whacky picture with the President, they had cutouts;

This is my personal nemisis, he stalks me at every event, I have a video of him today in which he calls me “an enemy of peace” (Actually, I’m thinking of changing the name of the blog to Enemy of Peace – it has a nice ring to it, ya know). He’s wearing the same pretentious “Peace” shirt he wears at every event, too. What I did to piss off the Travelocity Roaming Gnome, I’ll never know.

I’d like for this fellow to name one instance where nonviolence worked to solve anything when dealing with babarians;

The real rockstars of this rally, though, was supposed to be Adam Kokesh and his IVAW crowd. But I didn’t see them – well I saw them, but only as shadows moving around inside their rockstar bus away from the crowds and adoring fans;

Apparently, they’re not so hot on attacking Iran, either;

Well, we left the moonbats behind and went to the Gathering of Eagles down on the National Mall.

A much more lively group. Here’s a video of a Gold Star father’s speech to the crowd. (I’d embed this stuff if I could figure the darn thing out.

And the highlight of the day for me, was meeting Michelle Malkin;

You’ll notice the jumpwings on my cap are on a 1/325 AIR flash – I wore it today to honor the son of my good friend, COBDanny, who happens to be in Iraq while assigned to my old Battalion, the Red Falcons – the spearpoint of the surge. Hooah!

The funny thing is, I took this picture of Michele Malkin just prior and didn’t even recognize her;

The GOE group had better signs, too;

When the Moonbats finally started their parade of fools – THREE HOURS LATE – our side was out in front of them;

And this is the only sign that I saw that really expressed the moonbats true feelings;

In this photo, the protesters stretched a huge red banner across the road to keep the protesters bunched up so it looked like a bigger crowd. But it took about five minutes for them to pass as this video shows;

As this video attests, they thinned out pretty quickly. And this video shows how many they ended with at the Capitol – hardly the hundred thousand that’s being bandied about the web. And it hardly looks like the tightly compressed crowds that the media has been showing in their photos.

This is a video of Leftist fellow recruiting for the Army. And this ugly cow kept mooing the same thing over and over – “Take your ass to Iraq”. That’s the only response they have – “Go to Iraq”. Why? So we won’t be here to hold you accountable for your intellectually vacant yammering?

This is a video of a Gold Star father confronting a protester.

Meet Jake. His right forearm and hand are missing from an IED attack. I found him standing with his friend outside where the die-in was going on. I talked with him a while and I asked him how he was holding up, rockhard troop that he is. He answered, “This isn’t what I went to war for, dude. These people suck.”

They sure do, Jake, they sure do.

Michele Malkin has more about GOE at Walter Reed and the Live blogging today’s event. More from Gateway Pundit and Robin at Chickenhawk Express with the view from outside – all the stuff I missed because I was alternately surrounded by goofuses and heroes. Redhunter was there with great report from the GOE crowd, too. One thing is certain – everyone got pictures of Michele Malkin. That little girl was all over this thing.

The San Francisco Sentinel blog touts the ANSWER demonstration as the largest protest since January (which isn’t hard since all of the others were flops and January wasn’t so hot, either). ANSWER’s numbers are just over the top; they claim 100,000 marched with them – that’s just ridiculous. Even the AP story they use as a source only says “several thousand”. Like I said, there were less than four thousand that diminished to two thousand when the march ended. There were probably one or two thousand counter-protesters.

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has the news on the arrests at the DIe-in (Geez, I missed that part).

More from Kate of A Columbo-Americana’s Perspective – another MM sighting. Age of Hooper catches the corpse of Ramsey Clark on parade. Keep watching the sky – I mean Skye at Midnight Blue. I met her there, too, so I’m sure she’ll have some pics up soon (she also got a picture with Michelle Malkin). Big Dog wandered into the moonbat crowd when they were at their slobbering worst, as Big Dogs usually do and comes out unscathed with a report of biting incidents.

Powerline has pics of the Die-In and Victory Caucus has tons of photos and links to more blogs. Pam at BlogmeisterUSA and PC Free Zone has more pictures of the GOE side.

For some reason, veterans getting arrested is more honorable than veterans who continue to serve their brothers and sisters in uniform. Some Leftists wish for the good old days, while others think we’re “scared little babies“.

The Washington Post calls it “Dueling Demonstrations“, but it’s not really a duel when one side is has no clue what he’s doing. Bloodthirsty Liberal conducts a post-mortem on media coverage.

The Washington Times provides a more balanced account than the Post or AP.

Since Kokesh went out of his way to get arrested a week ago Thursday for putting up posters in a National Park with the press on hand to record his arrest, and since he also went out of his way to get arrested yesterday (Saturday, Sept. 15th) I gotta figure that they sense the failing support for their movement and they’re trying to whip up some outrage among the sheep. Like I said last week, we’re witnessing the death throes of the anti-war movement. Just like the American people are tired of hearing about the war, they’re also getting tired of hearing about the primadonnas of the anti-war movement.

They ride in rock star buses, play to the echo chamber and jet off to another scripted event, and Americans understand that they’re just trying to make a living by not working.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Gathering of Eagles, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Politics, Protests/Rallies, Support the troops