The Red (White and Blue) Squad

"Thank God for Fox News" Leo Lacayo, a writer for ChronWatch, pronounced. The assembled crowd, of maybe 500, gave a wild cheer. "And God Bless CNN" he continued, but the cheer was a bit more subdued the second time around.

The rally had started around noon and was in full swing by 1:00, though using the word swing was a being a bit charitable as the music that had been playing was a dreadful combination of 80's power ballads and patriotic post-911 knockoffs of the same.

It would have all been quite humorous if not for the fact that the SFPD seemed too be palling around with the crowd in a rather inappropriate way considering they were in uniform.

The officers on hand, when not wearing flags on their head, shooed of various riffraff and antiwar protesters for exercising their free speech. I overheard them telling several of the pro-peace people that they should go to the counter-protest staging area (whatever that might mean.) As one of the signs put it "Freedom isn't Free", though I wasn't entirely sure what that meant.

At one point, while a was taking pictures of a heated discussion between a pro-peace protester and a pro-war rally attendee, someone approached me at spat out "How is it that the media always finds the one violent thing going on." It was a good question, really.

At this point, someone else started to harangue me for something or other, but I stopped paying attention. They seemed to think I was with CNN (Apparently forgetting about the blessings given to the 24 news channel earlier.)

While most of the people seemed vaguely reasonable in their support for the war, some of the people were a bit nuts. My favorite was the Revelations spouting Les Erekson who proclaimed " When Jesus comes back he is going to kill the Satan worshiping baby-killing leftists." Oddly, when he wasn't yelling, he seemed like a pretty nice guy, and would hug people good-bye (even people on the left) after giving them a rather large piece of his mind.

The Prince of Bombs

More disturbing was the somewhat ill-considered signs that people were carrying about such as the one to the left. I will let you judge this deeply compassionate and Christian insight on your own.

There was only a small number of visibly pro-peace people at the rally. They had either prudently stayed away, had been escorted to the "staging area", or had been shouted down by various gaggles of pro-war types who would descend on anyone who audibly said anything antiwar. Some pro-peace messages got through, nonetheless...

Peace at the Pro-war Rally

Peace for Iraq

... still, a deeply distasteful feeling pervaded the whole event.

A Savage Nation

[more pro-war rally photos]