All freude, no schaden.

I'm just going to suggest that perhaps the strategy of alienating more than half the country in order to appease the Fox News addled, goon demographic isn't working. I say that because:

Pictured: thousands of life coaches, aging surfers, and probably a
hug therapist or two, all of which, in Santa Cruz, California are actual jobs.

Resistance, it turns out, smells
like vape and Tom's of Maine.

That picture is the No Kings rally I attended yesterday. I'm under the trees in the lower right-hand corner. What? Crowds make me nervous. Anyway, as I'm sure you can tell, that's like thousands of people. Ten thousand according to the estimate given in the local paper. Santa Cruz's population is sixty thousand, so that's one in six residents. One in six Santa Cruzians showed up. The other five presumably had to work, because goddamn it's expensive to live here. But still, I couldn't be more proud of my adopted hometown.

Ten thousand. That's a lot of hippies. It's also evidently the same number of people who turned out to watch a seventy-nine year old felon scowl at some antique tanks and creepy robot dogs as they roll down the streets of Washington.

I can't help but wonder who thought these headless nightmare fuel
robot dogs would inspire patriotism and not the cold dread of--
oh, wait, was it the tattoo guy? I bet it was the tattoo guy.

Above: a WWII tank struggles past
tens of apathetic attendees. 

It was, and this is putting it mildly, a boondoggle. I want to be clear that it was not the fault of the service men and women involved. They're just doing their job. And unfortunately, their job yesterday was a forty-million dollar ego stroke. A debacle that those responsible should take as a sign that they should resign and go into self-imposed exile. Probably somewhere without an extradition agreement. But instead I suspect we're going to be subjected to some incredibly strained spin about what a ringing success it was.

"Whomp, whomp."

-a sad trombone

You might recall the first Trump administration, hot off an abysmally attended inauguration, sending poor Sean Spicer out in front of the press to stand next to photos, actual photos, of a half-filled national mall, and to lie to our entire faces about how it was the most heavily attended inauguration in the history of the universe. Well, we can look forward to that despite the fact that the anti-Trump rallies around the country attracted something like eleven million. That's more than a thousand times the number of people. Anyone else would take the hint, right?

And look, I kind of feel for the President. Yesterday was a humiliation, and one that rests solely on him and his administration. Eleven million people took to the streets to call him a failure. On his birthday. But whenever I start to think that this might be schadenfreude I'm feeling, like, that maybe this is too harsh, even for him, I remember literally everything he's done both in his political career, and his life. Then's all freude, no schaden.

Hey, don't look so glum. You can always resign. Please resign? Resign.