The Wall Street Journal‘s Washington Wire reports that organizers of last weekend’s Million Teabagger March (oops, 75K Teabagger March, sorry) are upset about the level of service offered by the (government-run) DC Metro transit system.
As blogger Brody Mullins puts it: seriously.
Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.
Rep. Brady is from…wait for it…Texas.
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
I broke my calculator trying to figure out on how many levels this is pure, teabagging, hypocritical irony.
- Those
millionstens of thousands of teabaggers used the facilities of the government-run National Park system. - They left a significant amount of trash behind in garbage cans (mostly anti-socialism signs, of course) for the government-run sanitation department to dispose of.
- They arrived at the Tea Party on government-built and -maintained roads.
- They relied on government-funded police to provide security.
- Many of them are on government-provided social security and/or Medicare.
- And, most ironically, they used government-run public transportation to get around the city.
And now they’re complaining about it. They are not satisfied with the level of service from the socialist services that they decried on countless signs and in countless chants and of which they freely availed themselves.
Brady was apparently particularly outraged that some of the elderly and physically handicapped attendees had to pay for cabs with their very own money! Teh h0rR0rz!!!
Oh, Em. Eff Gee.
I’m just sayin’…
Update: Just wanted to say that I was in DC for the inauguration which had between 1.1 and 1.8 million people. They closed down pretty much all of the commuter lots around the perimeter because they were full. I was getting text messages from the Metro giving us updates and, to this day, when my iPhone “dings” to alert me to a new text, my wife says, “ah, another Metro lot just closed!”
Despite that, the Metro system was amazingly efficient given the burden they were operating under.
If you want to see what it was like to ride the Metro that day, check out my wife’s most awesome slideshow (with AWESOME music) that chronicles our adventure including the ride in on the Metro:
Bring a hanky. It’s a pretty awesome slideshow.
UPDATE 2: It turns out that, surprise, surprise, Rep. Brady vetoed funding for the DC Metro system this summer. I’m not sure how he expects this oh-so-socialist system to survive without funding. Just more of the brutal hypocrisy in this whole situation. More at Plum Line as well.
Also, we’ve gotten LOTS of super, super nice comments about the slideshow over at the Daily Kos version of this post. If you like what you see, please visit my wife’s website at Revolutionary Views, her blog Glimpse and her Flickr page. You won’t be disappointed, particularly if you are a fan of good photography.
