‘Metro: Don’t Panic’
courtesy of ‘nevermindtheend’
By now you’ve probably seen this unintentionally hilarious guide to DC published by a Maine Tea Party member for his cohorts planning to attend Glenn Beck’s March on DC this weekend (and his commenter’s assertion that the streets of DC are “more dangerous than Baghdad!”). And even better is Laura Olin’s intentionally hilarious Google Map of what areas of DC should be considered “safe.”
As a public service to you, our DC-loving readers, here are just a few of my personal suggestions for things to enjoy in DC that will no doubt not be overrun by protester-tourists*, falling as they do outside of the designated safe areas.
Ray’s the Steaks East River – This incarnation of Michael Landrum’s beef-serving empire is near Benning Rd. and has nearly all the same quality of his Arlington/Silver Spring locations, but at more attractive price points to accommodate the neighborhood it’s in. The smoked prime rib is life-changing.
Ted’s Bulletin on Capitol Hill – On 8th St. SE, near the Marine Barracks, I’ve never felt even a little bit unsafe heading to Ted’s, but since it’s in the SE quadrant, you will not find that the lines will be longer from an influx of our visitors. Try the short rib sandwich!
Ben’s Chili Bowl, Cafe Saint-Ex, and the Black Cat – Since it’s on the Green/Yellow line and our impending guest from Maine advises his friends to avoid those lines entirely, the U St. Corridor in general should be protester-free.
This is but the tiniest sample of what DC has to offer that does not fall in the area suggested by our soon-to-be guest from Maine, based entirely out of my own habits and preferences. No doubt, you have suggestions too, so please share them in the comments.
*Inevitably, persons sympathetic to the protesters’ cause will find this post and arrive to accuse me of picking on the Tea Partiers simply because I do not agree with them. If you think I’m mocking the Tea Party for that reason, then you clearly have not been paying attention to pretty much anything I’ve said about tourists and protesters for the last 6 years of my local blogging career, all readily accessible in the WLDC archives. Take your assumptions and accusations of bias elsewhere, for you are wrong, and I am tired of hearing it.
Tiffany Baxendell Bridge is an Internet enthusiast and an incurable smartass. When not heckling the neighborhood political scene on Twitter, she can be found goofing off with her ukulele, Bollywood dancing, or obsessing about cult TV. She is That Woman With the Baby In the Bar.
Tiffany lives in Brookland with her husband Tom, son Charlie, and two high-maintenance cats. Read why Tiffany loves DC.
Argonaut, The Pug and Granville Moore’s on H Street.
Big Bear Coffee in Bloomingdale.
Trusty’s near the “unsafe” Potomac Ave Metro Stop.
Hitching Post near Petworth.
That is *fantastic*. So, by this standard, Logan Circle, Lincoln Park, the side of Barracks Row that the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the actual Barracks are located on, and NoMa (where their temple, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms headquarters) are all too “unsafe” for them to go to! I’m going to spend the entire day over on the mall, giving these morons directions to Anacostia when they ask how to get to the White House….
You can always come to Fort Dupont Park in Ward 7 for Feet in the Street http://tinyurl.com/25m3hky
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You can also join the sane and not racist folks at a counter-rally at Dunbar High School that day.
http://www.dcvote.org/events/event.cfm?eventID=539
What’s up with the Green/Yellow line hate? I’ve ridden those for years without a problem! It’s the RED line that keeps crashing.
Although, having lived in both DC (the MD suburbs anyway) and Baghdad (2003-2004, humanitarian NGO work), I’d have to agree that there are many places in Baghdad which are safer than many places in DC. There are also many places in DC which are safer than many places in Baghdad.
So if you have to go to Baghdad, take me with you and I’ll show you the safe parts!
Also on H Street: Liberty Tree has good pizza, H Street Country Club has skee ball, and Biergarten Haus has beer.
OOh…don’t forget Saturday is Columbia Heights Day, and be sure to stop in at Bloombars! No tea partiers because its off the Green line, and too many “pesky ethnic types” like me will be there! http://bloombars.com
DC is a large, culturally diverse city with attractions that rival New York. But at the same time, the people of DC offer Southern hospitality to visitors. I live in Tidewater VA but drive to DC about one weekend per month to take mini-vacations. I love my nation, my government, and especially my nation’s capital.
Awesome post Tiffany!
And let’s not forget Barracks Row with its woinderful restaurants and oh yes the *Marine Corps Barracks* Clearly far too dangerous a neighborhood to visit. What a pity they’ll miss the Evening Parade on Friday night.
Awesome! We can count on them missing the DC State Fair then! (http://dcstatefair.wordpress.com/) Everyone else should enter the pickle contest and come on out!!
WOW ! Who knew our capital city was so UN welcoming to ” protester-tourists ” .
That’s a good thing for a nation of activists to know !
Go , Make your stand / point but keep your money in your pockets !
YOU wrote :”You can travel safely in this area without encountering immigrants, Africans, homosexuals, automatic weapons, or homosexuals with automatic weapons. If you avoid the Green and Yellow Metro lines. And buses. And coffee shops. And restaurants. And taxis,” says a note on the map.”
I’ll be at that rally , I have nothing to do with the tea party ! I had planned for my wife and I to spend a week there and take in the sites .
Now we’ll be leaving right after the rally . Who would want to spend time and money in a place they’re not welcome . My money will be spend elsewhere and I’ll be suggesting to as many ” protester-tourists ” as I can that they do the same .
We’ve never been to Washington before and we feel like we’ve already been given the boot !
It’s a damn shame that those two bigots are even being allowed to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They should be thrown in jail instead with some big black gay guys whipping their fat butts.
@Theresa
Your comment has no teeth as your *safe* zone EXCLUDED the places mentioned in this article and the previous comments. You were never going to spend your money there anyway.
Is it irony or hypocrisy or … both?
Who exactly is surprised by this?
No, they aren’t racist….they just need to point out how to treat other black people….no, not homophobic but need to tell people how to treat people they deem “gay”
Idiots
Oh joy. More protesters, bringing more traffic, more trash, and more pressure on our public services (police, fire/rescue, etc). Well, since I [apparently] live in the “unsafe” area of DC (Potomac Ave. SE, down by Congressional Cemetery), I suppose I’ll be safe from these bigots.
Technically it’s not a protest, per say. It’s a “Rally for Honor”. What that means, I haven’t any idea because their website doesn’t explain what honor is. If we’re to define honor by the video they provide, it apparently involves being blurry, running around with guns, american flags waving in the wind and random words written in gigantic block letters.
ANYWAY, great guide! I’m really glad I wear my body armor when I take the yellow line every single day. Without it, I’d surely have been killed by an IED by now.
Charles, as a point of clarification, I did not write the sentence you quote. Laura Olin gets credit for that one.
As it happens, I think it’s great (albeit wildly inconvenient for locals) when protesters come to our nation’s capital to seek redress. I just hate when they trash the place, literally and figuratively, while doing so. I don’t visit your home and complain about it.
My day with Leftover media bias
by Bruce P. Majors on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 10:00am
I was attacked yesterday on Rachel Maddow’s show and the Huffington Post (as well as Charles Johnson’s website “Little Green Footballs” and the New York city based website allegedly about DC, DCist.com) for my Blogger post recommending that people visiting on 8/28 avoid getting off at certain metro stops. Apparently that makes me a racist.
My blog is here: http://www.teapartiers.blogspot.com so you can be the judge.
Famous Beltway journ-o-list David Weigel called me, and then my tea party/CPAC friend Andrew Ian Dodge (who had re-posted my 8/28 March on DC travel tips on his Maine tea party website) instant messaged me almost simultaneously yesterday around 2 pm to tip me off.
My first reply, to the “Little Green Footballs” website:
“Chas, Chas, Chas — why such incompetence and/or dishonesty. That blog isn’t from Maine, it’s from DC. I wrote it and I have lived in DC since 1980. The blogger in Maine is just linking to my Tea Party blog, “Tea Party — One Lump or Two?” at http://www.teapartiers.blogspot.com. And despite your possibly legally actionable whine of racism, my injunction to strangers to not offend the local Ethiopian etc populations by making guesses about what country they are from, and my recommendation that strangers not get on the green or yellow lines and ride them out to the end of the city, had nothing to do with each other. Sorry Charlie. One again you show us what idiots you Demwits be.” http://littlegreenfootballs.com/
Of course, being a coward, Charles Johnson deleted that reply a few hours later (some of his own regulars complained that he did this) and blocked me from his website. Squawk!
(In in his defense, Johnson was just copying a story he saw at http://www.DCist.com website, which must be run by total morons. One wonders if all their coverage of DC is this incompetent? )
But then the lemmings at Huffington Post and the Rachel Maddow show repeated every innacuracy including that it was written in Maine (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/23/glenn-beck-rally-attendee_n_691578.html). Maddow even drew a map of the DC metropolitan area purportedly showing where I said strangers would be safest to get off and wander around, incompetently leaving out all of NW DC and Montgomery County (the Red line trains I had recommended people stay on). This girl should go back to Afghanistan and file more reports about how Obama’s predator drone killings (unlike Bush’s??) are just a delivery of essential city services, like she did last month. (Maddow had Eugene Robinson, from the little bus at the Washington Post, chortling along with her. One is surprised she didn’t spend 15 minutes tea bagging with him, but then, I guess Anna Marie Cox is more her bowl of fish.) And though she too falsely attributed the text to someone from Maine (the implication being they don’t know DC and are ‘fraid of those darkies!), she projected the text on the wall behind her so you could see “by Bruce Majors” for a few seconds.
And these people wonder why no one watches their network or reads their papers — or supports their candidates.
Postscript
Is (almost) every journ-0-list in DC a total moron? Some gal named Andrea Stone, who rose from the ranks of USAToday to scribble at AOLNews, has now posted a piece on this where she claims she repeatedly tried to reach me. My home phone number is listed and the lil darlin’ left no messages. Slate’s David Wegel managed to call me yesterday and WMAL radio called this morning. Maybe they could offer Andrea an internship and some training?
So glad that we rated your boilerplate screed, there, Brucey-Bruce!
Keep up the great work, we love to have something like this to mock the shit out of at least once a year.
Tommy I doubt you could mock your way out of a turtleneck. You sound like another [redacted]
This comment has been edited from its original form by an administrator for violation of We Love DC’s comment policy. The female anatomy is not an appropriate metaphor for weakness, especially when it’s a woman holding the banhammer.
Clever turn of phrase there, Bruce. Still, your guide was a pathetic excuse for an actual guide to DC. If you want people to be “safe” on their trip here, why are you telling them to avoid the yellow and green lines? They’re no more safe than the red line, which saw a 9-fatality accident last summer, and the neighborhoods that those stations encompass are for the most part quite safe. Am I glad that you told the cretins coming for the propaganda rally not to take them? Sure, but only insofar as they will stay out of great neighborhoods in DC.
Your guide was a huge joke to all of us who actually live in, and love, this great city. So by all means, continue. That’ll just leave the city to those of us who live here, instead of those so-called “patriots” who think that America is a construct meant for WASPs.
Uh, Tommy, you are a very little joke to me. I live in DC and have since 1980. I am sure I know it better than you do. What you read was probably not my guide but one of the various incompetents writing about it.
your sentence structure above is also inverted. Do you mean to say that the red or yellow or green lines are safer? Do you know what you mean to say?
whatsamatter Bruce – you don’t like being called on your racism?
@Bruce: You’ve lived here 20 years longer than I, and you STILL don’t know this town?
Laughable. Grammar nitpicks (which are welcome, and correct) notwithstanding, you still can’t seem to guide people around the city with the ease of a local. Hilarious.
“DC is a large, culturally diverse city with attractions that rival New York. But at the same time, the people of DC offer Southern hospitality to visitors.”
What a ridiculous statement. There is not nearly as much to do in DC as there is in New York. And since when are people in DC nice? I have been to over 20 countries on 4 continents and people in DC are probably the least friendly.
Anyways, not that I agree with the tea partiers but you have to understand they do not live near a big city like Washington DC. So it is comparatively dangerous for them.
Murder rate wise I think DC is worse than Baghdad, Iraq btw.
Nick
Re: Comparative Murder Rates.
Google before you speak.
DC(2009) 23.8/100,000
Bghd(2008) 48.0/100,000
That doesn’t even address the reporting bias. That is, not every death in Iraq end up in the morgue.
Particular parts of the female anatomy are actually quite… resilient!
Now Andy, have you rounded up your daily quota of poor black kids to sell to the educrat unions for Demwit campaign contributions?
Joe Biden says you can’t play on the computer until you have finished your chores.