Military Parade was a Flop; Too Bad, So Sad

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I'll admit up front that I didn't watch Trump's much ballyhooed military / birthday parade that was held in Washington, DC, on Saturday.  The event, which Trump himself seems to have engineered, cost somewhere north of $45 million taxpayer dollars and consumed quite a bit of our military's valuable time.  But Donald Trump, in the true spirit of other major world leaders of the past, people like Benito Mussolini and Jospeh Stalin, wanted a damn parade with tanks and rockets, and by God he got one!

News reports and photographic evidence reveal that the troops marching in the parade were likely better trained in their military occupational specialities (MOSs) than they were in precision marching, and that's fine;  it's as it should be.  The loneliness of the military tanks rolling slowly by one at a time was no doubt even more boring to those at the event watching live  than it was to people like me seeing snippets on-line.  

The crowd was thin, with even many Republican politicians actively seeking reasons to be absent.  I saw one photo of Secretary of State Marco Rubio sitting in a folding chair in the front row of the parade route looking as though he was in danger of falling asleep and rolling out in the path of whatever taxpayer-owned, olive drab vehicle happened to be passing.  Little Marco looked like he would much rather be back home in Florida swatting mosquitoes and slamming down Cuba Libres.   Sitting next to him was former Wrestling promoter and current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon who was also looking bored out of her gourd.  If only she had Hulk Hogan or some of her other intellectual peers close by to share her misery.

Perhaps the best critique of the long, long afternoon came from Trump himself who reportedly nodded off during the prolonged agony pageantry.

But the day was not a complete wash.  Pope Leo gave a very well received taped address over the Jumbotron at Rate Field in Chicago and provided inspiration to a packed venue of over 40,000 people.  Rate Field is the home of the Chicago White Sox, the new Pope's favorite professional baseball team.  Chicago also hosted a massive "No Kings" demonstration as a direct rebuttal to the authoritarian policies and practices of the Trump administration, as did over 4 million people in 2,000 or so other "No Kings" protests across the nation.

The Trump team claims 250,000 people were on the ground in Washington, DC, watching his military parade, but that number, as with most things said or generated by Donald Trump, is suspect.

Maybe next year somebody will decide to give the taxpayers a break and take Fearless Leader to McDonald's for his birthday celebration.  He likes it there.