Emily goes to (near) the White House; gets pissed off

I was about 100 yards from W today. A former Youth Venture VISTA had tickets to the White House's tree lighting ceremony and gave a group of them to us at the last minute. I hadn't known I was going, and so I didn't even bring a jacket along today, because the only portion of my commute where I need a jacket is the five-ish minutes between the front door of my apartment and entering the Pentagon City mall. My jacket is slightly unnecessary then and too bulky and too hot the rest of my commute, so today I dispensed with it altogether. Anyhow. I saw the first portion of the tree lighting ceremony (a lot of christmas caroling and thanking the performers; not so much tree-lighting) from far off, including a smaller than postal stamp sized view of George W and Laura Bush's heads, and then I made my cold way out of there, because I was cold. I did get a closer view of the south side of the White House than one normally gets, because it's usually blocked off.

Curiously, the event was entitled the "2005 Christmas Pageant of Peace." Were they just trying to provoke liberals to remember Orwell's War=Peace slogan? The portion of the program I attended contained no mention of the fact that we are a nation at war. As I was leaving, they were just getting to talking about Louisiana and the Gulf Coast states in a self-congradulatory way. Bloody brilliant spectacle. Bloody, at least.