I have about 150 pics, so I'll just provide the link to where they are later tonight.
The Protests of Disgust House Editorial
They had to come, the anti-International Monetary Fund/World Bank protesters who gathered in Washington over the weekend. A little thing like 6,000-plus dead Americans wasn't about to change their minds—besides, it had taken them minutes and minutes to redo their cardboard placards to announce that violence isn't the answer and that America is the problem.
Perhaps those sentiments, more than any other, explain why they gathered on Saturday at Freedom Plaza. One protester wore a t-shirt that read, "I'm afraid of Americans." Another shirt proclaimed, "Columbus was the original terrorist." Others denounced "America's racist war" and "American imperialism." A few speakers actually expressed regret for the terrorist attack, but most seemed to think that the United States had it coming. They were denouncing America at such an aggrieved pitch that all dogs within earshot were barking and small furry rodents were scurrying away at top speed.
Perhaps the critters couldn't bear the sight of the crowd, where dirty yellow signs screamed that revenge is bad, youths in burnt umber costumes decried the famine in Afghanistan, and anarchists in black sweatsuits suspiciously lingered in the background.
There was also a heavy pink patina: Passing out pamphlets were what seemed to be every communist not tenured at Berkeley, attired in suits whose manufacture (and last laundering) probably occurred during the October Revolution. Not that anyone was reading the pamphlets. Perhaps they simply couldn't.
The organizers of the protest certainly couldn't count, which, coupled with their probable room temperature IQs, might help explain why they estimated the crowd at 25,000. After all, a sixth-grade level of math does little good when you run out of fingers and toes and body piercings ("Seventeen, eighteen . . . 25,000"). Arresting the lot of them would have rocketed up the test scores at campuses around the country. Police estimated the crown marching up Pennsylvania at 4,500, far fewer than were brutally murdered during the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.
There were no commemorations for the people who perished at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the crash in Pennsylvania. No one seemed to care about the widows and the orphans. The large-denomination donations requested were not even set aside for disaster relief. In fact, aside from journalists and a few courageous and patriotic counter-protesters, not a single person seemed to be thankful for their hard-won freedom, that which enables protesters to spit in Uncle Sam's face. Nor did it seem to matter that such behavior would have gotten them bloodied in Beijing and killed in Kabul.
America is too good for these people — the major-league practitioners of the protests of disgust.