PIctures at site
Walter Reed Three Years After
By Tantor
Three years ago Code Pink, a far left group, felt it would be a good idea to protest the war in Iraq at the front gate of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, where the grievously wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan were treated. It was the spring of 2005 when CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, Plymouth UCC, Military Families, Newspaper Guild, Gray Panthers, and OPEIU Local 2 began protesting every Friday night from 8 to 10 PM. They called it a vigil, not a protest, but shit by any other name still stinks the same.
The DC Chapter of the Free Republic, outraged at the insensitive and insulting choice of locations and sentiments for this obnoxious protest, decided in March 2005 to counter-protest the Code Pink protest. Tom the Redhunter has written a very good, brief history of the Walter Reed protest here in the Free Republic website, from which I have plucked the essentials. The bottom line is that three years later, protesters and counter-protestors are locked in a grim war of attrition which the Freepers are winning. There has been a dramatic change for the better since I visited first in August and September 2005.
The one thing protestors hate is being protested. The Free Republic, "Freeper," counter-protestors have now been out there 154 Friday nights, steadily gaining the advantage over protestors who suffered from disorganization, poor morale, and a bad cause. Code Pink tried the usual radical lefty tricks to counter the Freepers. They screamed in outrage at the dissenters, villified and demonized them, tried to infiltrate them, tried to get the police to suppress them, tried to get the neighborhood to call in complaints against them, et cetera. As usual, the lefties try to throttle the free speech of political opponents in their typical heavy-handed, un-American fashion. None of it worked.
The Code Pink protest suffered moral problems from the beginning. Being actively confronted by the Freepers made them uncomfortable, defensive, and edgy. They had expected a monopoly on their protest venue. Being protested for protesting didn't seem fair to them. Their moral authority was being challenged and undermined and they didn't know what to do about it, and still don't. Most protestors are in it for the fun of partying. Being counter-protested takes the fun away and strips a protest of most of its numbers.
The next morale problem came with the bus. Every Friday night, patriotic local businessmen treat a busload of wounded warriors to a night on the town. That bus returns about 9:30 PM at which time all the guys on board would flip the finger to Code Pink. That was a bitter blow to the morale of the Pinksters, who absurdly thought the troops would appreciate their protest at the hospital and all those "Maimed for Halliburton" signs. Once the guys had the bus driver stop halfway in the gate and turn on the interior lights so the Pink Ones could see their middle fingers more clearly. That's when Code Pink moved their protest from 8 to 10 PM to 7 to 9 PM, so they'd avoid seeing the soldiers.
The glory days of the Code Pink protest lasted about ten months, when the organizers fumbled the demonstration permits and forgot to renew them. The Freepers had been lurking at the permit office, waiting for exactly such a screw up. Code Pink had permits for both corners on either side of the main gate of Walter Reed, where Elder Street NW ran into the base. The Freepers had the corners across Georgia Avenue NW. When Code Pink let its permit lapse, the Freepers snapped them up.
The night of January 21, 2006 the Pinksters came to their corners at the main gate only to find the Freepers camped out on them, dangling the permit in front of their pink little faces. That was a bitter night for the Pinksters, who dragged their protest signs down in defeat to a little nook half a block away. From there, their protest has gone into a death spiral. Their numbers declined from a regular fifty folks down to half a dozen. Code Pink virtually abandoned the protest, a member or two only showing up sporadically after that, once to call the troops the terrorists. The Walter Reed Vigil Reports stopped at Number 16 in December, 2005. The thrill was gone.
From that time, the Freeper effort has been an exercise in managing and hastening the demise of the Walter Reed protest.
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