RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘You’re so vain, you prolly think this march is about you,” read a sign at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. I thought to myself: This is about him, isn’t it?

I put that question to Breanne Butler, the march’s global coordinator, who insisted the answer was no: “This isn’t a march on Trump,” she said. “It’s a march on Washington,” including Congress, the Supreme Court and “any other representatives.” The message, according to Ms. Butler: “Hear our voices, we’ve been silenced. You need to take us into consideration. . . . We are America.”

That sounded a lot like the message voters were sending when they made Donald Trump president: They felt marginalized and voiceless. Ms. Butler, a 27-year-old New Yorker on sabbatical from her job as a pastry chef, said she hopes progressives and Trump voters can acknowledge their differences and find common ground, although she later called Mr. Trump’s election “a symptom of a bigger disease,” namely “complacency.”

Complacency didn’t seem to be a problem for the self-proclaimed “nasty women”—and men—who made the pilgrimage to the capital. They numbered perhaps half a million. And if Ms. Butler’s title, global coordinator, seemed grandiose for a march “on Washington,” it wasn’t. She had a hand in organizing more than 600 marches in every state and on all seven continents—yes, even Antarctica.

In Mr. Trump’s hometown, an estimated 400,000 people marched down Second Avenue. Women in Japan marched for higher education; in Ethiopia, for clean water. The Antarctic march took place aboard a boat.

The marchers in Washington seemed to have a million messages. One big theme was reproductive rights. “Get your policies out of my exam room,” read one sign defending Planned Parenthood. Others read “Save ACA, live long, and prosper,” “My body my business,” and “Reproductive rights are human rights.” Many women carried signs depicting the female anatomy or wore crocheted pink cat ears—a pun on a vulgar term Mr. Trump once uttered.

There were plenty of other pet causes. “Racial justice = LGBTQ issues,” read one sign. A popular poster featured a woman in an American-flag hijab and the words “We the people are greater than fear.” Forty-year-old Pablo Rosa, who immigrated to the U.S. when he was 13, carried a sign that said “Mexico owes US nothing.” Other posters called Mr. Trump “the Kremlin candidate” and “Putin’s pawn,” pleaded to “protect our planet,” and proclaimed: “Public education is a civil right.”

The mood on Saturday was upbeat—surprisingly so, given the divisions that emerged during the march’s planning. Leading up to the march several posts on the organization’s social media pages erupted in controversy. ShiShi Rose, a social media administrator for the march, wrote an Instagram post titled “White Allies Read Below.” She instructed that “no ally ever got very far without acknowledgment of their privilege daily” and informed white women that they “don’t just get to join because you’re scared too. I was born scared.”

The comments exploded. “This makes me not want to go now,” one woman wrote. “This is all for all women! Not just black, white but brown, Muslim etc.” Another observed that “women were suppressed throughout history. This is an event about women banding together, not tearing each other apart because you’re bitter.”

When I asked Ms. Butler about such exchanges, she said they had concerned her initially. But after reading one of the posts, she concluded its author had a point: “We aren’t taking your history into consideration, and we need to.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump made a smart move in visiting the CIA on his first full day on the job, but he and his staff are going to have to raise their game if they want to succeed at governing. This was not a presidential performance.

The visit made sense to repair any misunderstandings from the campaign and transition when Mr. Trump sometimes seemed to attack the entire intelligence community for the leaks that Russia tried to help his campaign. Those leaks were almost certainly put out or authorized by the Obama White House or senior intelligence officials appointed by President Obama. The rank and file didn’t do it.

“I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country towards making us safe, towards making us winners again,” Mr. Trump told employees assembled in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall for those have died in the covert service. “I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job, and we’re going to start winning again and you’re going to be leading the charge.” So far so good.

But Mr. Trump also couldn’t resist turning the event into an extended and self-centered riff about the size of his campaign rallies, the times he’s been on Time magazine’s cover and how the “dishonest” media misreported his inaugural crowds. He all but begged for the political approval of the career CIA employees by suggesting most there had voted for him.

Such defensiveness about his victory and media coverage makes Mr. Trump look small and insecure. It also undermines his words to the CIA employees by suggesting the visit was really about him, not their vital work. The White House is still staffing up, but was it too much to ask National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s staff to write up five or 10 minutes of formal remarks that had something to do with the CIA?

I watched U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on TV in Israel, alternating ‎between Hebrew- and English-speaking channels, so as not to miss any detail or piece of ‎commentary.‎

The buildup to the momentous event had been dramatic. Until late in the race, it ‎appeared that Hillary Clinton was going to strut away with the Democratic nomination ‎and beat Republican candidate John McCain with one hand tied behind her back.‎

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, an unknown senator from Illinois emerged and ‎proceeded to crush her vision of re-entering the White House as its master, not simply first lady.‎

Mrs. Bill Clinton was understandably livid to see the effect that Obama had on her party ‎and its supporters. Not only was he everything she was not: tall, dark, handsome and ‎charismatic; he also outranked her in minority status. She may have had hopes of ‎becoming the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. But he was black.‎

In addition, though Clinton had a political record that could be critiqued — and a spouse ‎whose blatant infidelities led to his impeachment, but not to her divorcing him — Obama ‎possessed a picture-perfect nuclear family and no visible blemishes on his enigmatic past.‎

Both had been Saul Alinskyites in their youth, but Clinton had long since sold her ‎radicalism to the highest bidder, exchanging ideology for financial opportunism and ‎power lust. Obama, on the other hand — considerably younger than his rival — was still in ‎the throes of his late mentor’s teachings. ‎

For Clinton, America’s greatness and abundance were there for exploitation. Obama ‎viewed the country and its institutions as a lump of unappealing clay he was anointed to ‎pummel and remold in his image. His motto of “hope and change” disguised this agenda, ‎but it invigorated a disgruntled public hungry for Utopia. Neither Clinton nor McCain ‎stood a chance.‎

When Obama was sworn in — his hand disturbingly on the Bible whose passages he had ‎spent 20 years hearing in sermons preached by his anti-American, anti-white and anti-‎Semitic pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright — I longed to join in the festivities. ‎

Indeed, it was a truly historic occasion for a country in which segregation was still ‎practiced in my lifetime, to be electing a black president. As cameras zoomed in on Oprah ‎Winfrey weeping tears of joy, I wanted to join her. I wished to be cheering, rather than ‎mourning what I anticipated was going to be a concerted effort to destroy the great ‎United States from within and appease its external enemies to the point of endangering ‎Israel.‎

I am no stranger to protesting, having marched so often in the sixties and seventies that I sometimes felt as if I were chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ” in my sleep. But I have come to think over the years that too much demonstrating can get to be a bad habit, like smoking.

Now I’m not talking here about the Gloria Steinems and Michael Moores, for whom protest is so much a way of life they couldn’t exist without it. Or the Madonnas who, like other entertainment stalwarts, have business reasons for constantly reminding us they are still have their “edge” even as they age, liberally dropping the f-bomb and speculating about bombing the White House in the process.

I’m talking about the rest of us, especially, this weekend, a fair percentage of the women of America who descended on our nation’s capital and elsewhere in impressive numbers.

Excuse me if I don’t get it. What exactly was motivating them?

Oh, right, Donald Trump, that vulgar misogynist who bragged about pu**y grabbing (asterisks to dissociate myself from Madonna, even though I’m aging too). I’m going to skip over the obvious – these same women almost all ignored Bill Clinton actually doing (not just mouthing off about) similar activities in the Oval Office, not to mention on numerous other occasions, some of which we know about and some of which we may not. Further, these women didn’t have much to say — no demonstrations, no marches, maybe a few hashtags — when radical Islamists of various stripes regularly kidnapped large numbers of women (Nigerians, Yazidis, Kurds, etc., etc.) from their homes and took them as sex slaves, often beheading them after they finished raping them. Nor did they even pipe up when honor killings were going on in their own backyard.

I could go on. But those are just, shall we say, a few of the minor inconsistencies mixed with, perhaps, a soupçon of cognitive dissonance. Something more must be motivating these hundreds of thousands of women.

Oh, yes, reproductive rights. Break out your clothes hangers. The Donald is going to bring back the era of backroom abortions

Rubbish.

The idea that Trump, given his life and background, is a social conservative is almost silly. His primary issues were — need I reiterate what must be drilled in all our brains — bringing back jobs, lowering personal and corporate taxes, cutting excessive business and environmental regulations, ending illegal immigration, repealing and replacing Obamacare, rebuilding the military, extreme vetting of immigrants from countries where terrorism is prevalent, an America-first foreign policy (no nation building) and revived infrastructure.

On the campaign trail, the social issues were almost completely ignored. I listened to at least twenty of his speeches (probably a lot more) and can’t recall his mentioning same-sex marriage even once. (He was known to be favorable to it years before Obama and Hillary “evolved” on the issue.)

As for abortion, Donald has evolved toward being pro-life to some extent, but so have, apparently, a majority of Americans. They have shown this by their actions. According to a recent report from the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate in America has decreased precipitously from 29.3 per 1000 women in 1980 to 14.6 in 2014. Whether this steep decline was caused by the advent of advanced sonograms making the emergent human being more visible and palpable in the womb or because of more accessible birth control (probably both), these facts-on-the-ground are far more important than any legislation or judicial ruling. Abortion is gradually disappearing as fewer and fewer want it. It’s hard to imagine Trump expending any political capital to speed up this process, assuming he wanted to and if it were even possible, both of which are highly unlikely.

So back to square one. What was the purpose of Saturday’s demonstrations? None, I think, meaning nothing substantive in the provable sense. They were propaganda. Basically the protests were media and social media ginned-up events intended to continue opposition to the myth, not the reality, of a Trump administration for political purposes. (Some were even claiming he was about to put people in concentration camps.)

The success of the demonstrations in terms of size attests to the power of mutually reinforced paranoia. This paranoia is of course magnified by the extraordinarily fractured nature of our society with almost everyone living inside their own echo chamber with fears building upon themselves, much in the manner of the Salem Witch Trials.

This makes demonstrations to a great degree pointless because the demonstrators make little attempt to reach out beyond the converted and convince their opponents of the rightness of their cause. If fact, they rarely even try. Instead, they parade their “rightness,” their superiority, to impress themselves, as did the myriad women in the pink pudenda beanies Saturday. They are mostly showing off.

Ironically, these women’s marches are strangely behind the times in today’s America and therefore largely irrelevant, though the participants may not realize or acknowledge it. More women have been going to college than men for several years and are just now surpassing them in law school as well. Hillary Clinton may have lost the election but women are well on track to win the war. Within a very few years, historically we may be living in a matriarchy of sorts. Instead of freaking out over an election, these women should relax and enjoy their coming power. It’s manifested all over the Trump administration already in the persons of Kellyanne Conway (she could run for president herself — and win) and Ivanka Trump (so could she).

Imagine Ivanka allowing her father to backpedal on abortion rights. Not happening.

Which leads me to a final point — people who demonstrate all the time should consider they risk morphing into a collective version of the boy who cried wolf. When there’s something really worth protesting, no one believes them anymore.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. Follow him on Twitter @rogerlsimon

JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — Former President Obama declared to staffers and members of the military that “yes we did, yes we can” after taking his last helicopter ride around the Capitol and before departing for California.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump walked the Obamas down the Capitol steps after the inauguration, as is customary, and waved as the now-former first couple took off in the Marine helicopter.

It took a spin around the Washington Monument before heading to Andrews, where Obama quipped that he and Michelle have “really been milking this goodbye thing.”

“Some folks didn’t think we could pull it off. There were those who felt that the institutions of power and privilege in this country were too deeply entrenched,” he said. “And yet, all of you came together in small towns and big cities, a whole bunch of you really young, and you decided to believe. And you knocked on doors and you made phone calls, and you talked to your parents who didn’t know how to pronounce Barack Obama.”

“And you got to know each other. And you went into communities that maybe you’d never even thought about visiting. And met people that on the surface seemed completely different than you — who didn’t look like you or talk like you or watch the same TV programs as you. And yet once you started talking to them, it turned out that you had something in common.”

Obama said his change movement was “infused with a sense of hope,” and his staff and supporters “proved the power of hope.”

“And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you in the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military’s not a thing, it’s a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it,” the former president said.

“As cool as the hardware is, and we’ve got cool hardware, as cool as the machines as weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people, some of them a lot closer to Malia’s age than mine or Michelle’s. Well, the same thing’s true for our democracy. Our democracy’s not the buildings, it’s not the monuments, it’s you being willing to work to make things better and being willing to listen to each other and argue with each other and come together and knock on doors and make phone calls and treat people with respect.”