Gathering Of Eagles III, Part 1

The Gathering of Eagles, a pro-military/pro-American group, stole a march on ANSWER when they discovered that the commies planned a big anti-war march in Washington, DC at noon of September 15th by organizing a counter-protest that morning called "Gathering of Eagles (GOE) III." GOE III kick-started the opposition at 9 AM on the National Mall next to the Hirshhorn Museum of contemporary art.


The first GOE counter-protested the startled protestors of ANSWER when they announced they were going to start their "March on the Pentagon" last March next to the Vietnam War Memorial. That did not sit well with the Vietnam vets, or any vets, or any reasonable American. That's what got GOE started.

Support Victory. It's just that simple. We won the conventional war in Iraq in five weeks. Winning the unconventional war will take ten years. It's hard to win a guerrilla war fast but it's easy to lose it fast. The new decentralized strategy of fighting the insurgents implemented by General Petraeus is slowly working. We should let it play out.

Military history tells us that most guerrillas lose against a standing army. A guerrilla strategy is a strategy of weakness. Their defeat on the battlefield is inevitable. The best guerrilla country is mountainous, like Yugoslavia. Iraq is flat as pool table, terrible country for guerrillas. Even worse, Iraq's insurgents are urban guerrillas, the most vulnerable of all guerrillas. It's just a matter of time and effort before guerrillas hiding in a city are rounded up. They're doomed.

Military history also tells us that the only way guerrillas can win is to attack the enemy politically on his home front, wearing down the will to win through propaganda. That's the way the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam war. It's how Fidel conquered Cuba. It's the only hope for the remnants of the Baathist tyranny and Al Qaed jihadis in Iraqi. In that sense, ANSWER is the Iraqi insurgency's greatest hope along with defeatist Democrats in Congress, their liberal supporters, and, of course, the liberal media.

GOE III was a festival of American flags, a sight which gladdens the heart of real Americans.

The nice people there weren't content to just fly the Flag. They WERE the Flag.


Kristinn Taylor, the D.C. Coordinator of the Gathering of Eagles, kicks off GOE III. Kristinn has done some fine work keeping the counter-protest going against the Code Pink protest of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Pinkomaniacs have been protesting the war wounded at the gates of the hospital for over two years now every Friday night from 7 to 9 PM. Kristinn and the Freepers (Free Republic) have been in a protest war of attrition there which they have slowly been winning, beating down the protest from a high of about 150 protestors to the last half dozen die hards. Good on ya, Kristinn!

GOE III started with the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, and a prayer. That's something you'll never see at an ANSWER rally.

While the talkers talked, the Marines had their back behind the stage.


If you want to get a good look at the heart of America, it was on display at GOE III. These are the people who raise their kids to respect the military and consider it their duty to enlist.


A Vietnam combat vet and his wife.


A WWII vet.



A protest babe. Yeah, I can imagine it. Visualize Victory.

Larry Bailey, Chairman of the Gathering of Eagles, retired as a captain (the O-6 kind, equivalent to an Army colonel) in the US Navy after twenty-seven years as a Navy SEAL, including comand of the Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWC), the SEAL (Sea, Air Land) school in Coronado, California. You can't get more impressive military credentials than that short of flying fighters for the Air Force. The stories he could tell. Oh, wait a minute, he told some of them here. Mr. Bailey told me:

"We were founded for one reason and one reason only: To make sure that the Left does not have a free pass to work their will on the national policy like they did in the 1960s and 1970s. Never again. They shall not pass. Anytime they want to go somewhere they're going to find Eagles standing in their path."

A Guardian Angel knows which side to support.

George Samek of Shallotte, NC takes pride in defeating Cindy Sheehan at Bryant Park in Charlotte, NC during her protest tour. He organized a counter-protest and told her Code Pink advance woman what they had planned. That was enough to stop Cindy cold in her tracks. Even with fourteen policeman to guarantee order, she wouldn't step out of her car.

Many of the celebrity protestors lack the courage of their convictions. They want the rush of adulation and attention but they don't want the responsibility of defending their positions. Very often, a simple counter-protest will throw them off. From direct observation of about three years of protests, I can tell you that the one thing protestors hate most is being protested. It seems wildly unfair to them and outrageous. They think free speech is groovy when they're the ones pitching verbal tarballs but they don't dig it at all when they're catching them. They want a monopoly on the public forum and all dissent from their position suppressed.

Mr. Samek went on to counter-protest the protestors at the West Point and Coast Guard Academy graduations this year where President Bush spoke.

Keep up that good work, George Samek. You're on the side of the angels.

Note the Vietnamese-American guy on the right whose sign thanks America for saving his family. My guess is that there were about a thousand people at GOE III.


This is what the face of real support for the troops looks like.

The crowd overwhelmingly wanted Petraeus to keep winning the war, for the military to bring Iraq to a positive end.


I'm a believer in a crowd of believers.



GOE's attempt to reach out and dialogue with Code Pink.



Can't we all just get along? Come to think of it, maybe not. The Left wants us to abandon Iraq and let it turn into a perfect hell, a Hobbesian world of all against all, a bloody anarchy of violence. Perhaps they should go join their vision of the future, should it come true.


Melanie Morgan, that rarest of birds, a conservative talk radio host from San Francisco, is chairman of Move America Forward, who led a caravan of supporters cross-country to Washington while harassed by the Left.

Speaking of fabulous conservative journalists, I met Michelle Malkin when I was wandering by the press stand. Her baseball cap did a pretty good job of disguising her if I hadn't seen her a hundred times on TV and could recognize her by the line of her jaw. Michelle looks ten feet tall on the tube but in person she's a tiny elfin woman who shakes your hand with a petite hand light as air. I was so distracted I forgot to take a picture of her. Now I feel like a failure as a blogger, letting the moment slip by without recording it. I don't know why you people read me.

The Eagles don't do surrender. And they don't think terrorists are freedom fighters.

Getting the priorities straight.

How this psycho killer Che became the idol of the Left is beyond me. When Che executed his first victim, a fellow revolutionary, he wrote a letter home to his pappa in Argentina telling him how much he liked killing people. What a sick bastard he was.



Andrius Vaitekunas of Warrington, VA takes flag-waving to a whole new level. Andrius, I commend you on your proud display of patriotism, but, dude, you're scaring me a little.



What a good point. Isn't it odd how the most venomous criticism of the US as a facist tyranny is delivered on its own soil without retribution, eliciting only yawns from the government, while the true tyrannies in Iran and Syria, oddly enough, attract no criticism and even support from the Left? These are tyrannies which crush critics like bugs. What an irony it is that maintaining a right to free speech provokes the most criticism, simply because irresponsible criticism carries no cost as long as it is directed at a free nation.



A couple very nice ladies wandered by on their way to the ANSWER protest and stopped in surprise to find a counter-protest. Both claimed to have sons in the military. They held up their signs for a few minutes but nobody really bugged them. After a bit, they walked on.

The answer to whether we are any safer six years after September 11 seems painfully obvious on the National Mall where the Capitol was one of the main targets of the suicide skyjackers. For the Muslim fanatics, it is the center of blasphemy where infidels write man-made laws and dare to place them above the law of Allah as laid down in the Koran. If the Capitol is not in smoking ruins and you do not see crowds running for their lives in a panic on the Mall, then, yes, America is a safer place. We have not avoided follow-on attacks because the jihadis have given up trying to do us evil. They fail in their plots because we have returned their jihad to them.

Something to remember is that many of the people on the opposing side of this war debate are good, well-meaning, honest people who are simply wrong, but whose differences with us are best gently treated.

That reminds me, I wonder what's happenning over in Moonbat Land? I think I'll walk over to Lafayette Park and see what ANSWER is up to.

Please follow along by clicking on "Code Pink, Part 2."