IDAY NOTES.

I bike to Union Station weekday mornings to get the Metro to my job. Throughout the early part of the week they'd been polishing up the Great Hall at the station, setting out tables and erecting these grim-looking, 20-foot-tall, dark-grey replicas of the Washington Monument. Big deal inauguration-related dinner, thought I. Friday I left my bike parked as usual at the station's east end bike racks and as I headed for the Metro noticed the station's portals had been sealed up, which seemed a bit much. It wasn't until later that I thought to check the news and found that this was to be the site of a "candlelight dinner" for Trump donors and that Trump and Pence families would be there to press their cold, cash-rich flesh. Sure enough, when I got back to Union Station last night there was massive security -- cops and concrete barriers everywhere, with a five-block perimeter of parked, darkened buses and wire fencing -- and a long line of men in tuxes and ladies in gowns waiting to take their tables. I imagine them there, candles guttering, their light casting fluttering shadows from the dark Monuments like spectral hellgates.

I had to go wide around all this to get to the bike racks -- or to within fifty feet of them, as they were locked down too. So that's something else I have against the new Administration.

Buses being interrupted and cabs unavailable, I walked home, and back to the station this morning to get the bike (being blessedly granted home-labor on account of the Day). The station is just above the Red Zone where locomotion becomes difficult today. There were about a hundred of these #ResistJ20 guys on the plaza, giving the stream of inauguration-goers coming from the station something to scowl at. There were also lots of porta-potties, and lots of hawkers. "PONCHOS!" yelled one guy walking around in one as some drizzle came down, holding folded clear and yellow plastic in each hand. "You got it, buddy!" yelled another guy at his folding table of Trump t-shirts and hats.

Then back home through Northeast D.C., where all was the same as on any Friday except maybe a little quieter; I could hear birds filling the bare trees on F Street, singing.

UPDATE. I couldn't watch it; from the transcript the speech appears to be the same roaring gibberish as usual. The usual suspects are all like, hmm, he didn't pivot to Classy Presidential Mode, that's certainly a surprise -- like they were born yesterday and slow for their age.

As I alluded last night, conservatives are at the party but standing near the door, hoping to preserve plausible deniability when Il Douche does something too ham-handed; hence their coverage of the inauguration is a bit stiff and lacks the joyful rush you'd expect from people whose dream of wrecking the country is coming true. Take Dan McLaughlin at National Review:

I suspect the part everyone will remember is his invocation of “America First,” repeatedly and as a theme of his foreign and domestic policy and even as a theme of his calls for unity: ”When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” The implication here is that America is a family: outsiders viewed with suspicion, but everyone within treated with love and respect. Obviously, we’re a long way from the latter goal, and Trump has hardly been innocent of exacerbating that, but it’s at least a worthy aspiration.

Aspiration! Run that by Trump; he'll say, "Yes, that's 90% of success, I believe Thomas Jefferson said." People of all persuasions pretend to see the Emperor's New Clothes sometimes, but even McLaughlin cannot hide his embarrassment at having to project an aura of Lincolnian patriotism onto this brutal oaf. I expect he'll eventually get the hang of it well enough and with time his flopsweat will dry, but the smell of bullshit will never quite go away.