Monday, July 4
Napping through the revolution
Welcome to Scotland – home of bagpipes, Sean Connery, kilts, Adam Smith, Scotch whiskey, John Knox, golf, and haggis—the food that promises to put hair on the chest of a woman, and makes even the stoutest of men whimper like a child.

We were greeted at the airport by the Scottish press, Edinburgh school children, former Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, comedian Eddie Izzard, and Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell. Photo-ops all around. Branson was made for this kind of thing. He descends the stairs of the aircraft with the thumbs up-turned, while his Virgin babes waved banners. I love this guy.

After waiting for what seemed like hours for our luggage, we cleared customs and were greeted by the G-8 Bobbleheads. Everyone is more than ready to check into our hotels and get a little sleep before we start back up again.

Tony Carnes of Christianity Today, Greg Beals of Newsday, and I took a cab to the Macdonald Holyrood – a posh hotel in a quiet section of town. After checking in, Tony and I went around the corner to The Tun and had fish and chips. I almost never eat fish and chips at home, but for some reason it seems so fitting when in the United Kingdom. I went upstairs and crashed. Later that night, after virtually everything had stopped serving food, I cruised on over to the Bengal Tiger for some great Indian food.

I am travelling with a few other bloggers on this trip. Below you will see Josh Trevino, Charmaine Yoest, and John Aravosis. Ironically, the two on the left are from the right while the one on the right is from the left. Make sense? Delicious irony!

While I was napping, liberal blogger John Aravosis (AmericaBlog.org) was detained by the police for getting in the middle of the anti-G8 protests. He went for a walk outside his hotel which is right on the main drag in Edinburgh where all of the protesters do their thing. "Well, long story short," he writes. “Someone apparently hit a cop in the head with a brick, so the entire two streets were cordoned off for an hour, the riot police slowly moved in on us, I was huddled with the safest looking people I could find, a cute older couple from Edinburgh out a on week and a Peruvian guy here on vacation. After an hour, they finally let us go -- there were easily 100+ people trapped/detained, and they slowly let us out, 3 at a time, made us stop, and then photographed us, every single one. As much as I understand where the cops are coming from, and they were quite friendly considering, the hour detention of over a hundred innocent civilians and the photographing each and every one before they let us go, struck me as a bit odd. I was wondering about the legality of that."

I am sorry I missed it. My hotel is on the other side of town in a sleepy section of Edinburgh. Next time, I am requesting Ground-Zero when they are doling out the hotel assignments.

One of the conservative bloggers, Josh Trevino from RedState.org also spent the afternoon among the protesters. Here is his take: “Interspersed amongst the working Scots of the town were out-of-place youth, dirty, disheveled, and profane; and almost all dressed in black. They ranged in apparent age from their mid-teens, with the girls still sporting baby fat, and the boys striving mightily to grow thin beards; to their mid-30s, at which point they were rangy, ragged, and almost uniformly male. Many carried banners, but none carried signs. They were therefore cryptic figures, intelligible to those not of their kind only as was the rebel without a cause: 'What are you rebelling against?' 'Whaddya got?'"

He continues: "It's a deeply appealing motto to the juvenile, the witless, and the uninformed: but as maturity and the grim logic of consequences set in, its appeal tends to fade. Reject capitalism? Hate wage slavery? Detest the corporate world? Good luck at the collective, comrade, and sorry your girl left you for the fellow with the Prius. (As mentioned, the more middle-aged didn't appear to have so many women in tow.) Looks like the good life and social conscience can mix, so long as you're willing to sell out just a bit. And when selling out is defined as working, obeying local laws, and washing up from time to time, it's damned hard not to."

Josh concludes: “But the true believers exist, and they are capable of organizing themselves. A counterintuitive thing, one would think, but the anarchist/hard left capacity for assembling at set times and doing set thing is a well-proven one....the contraindicating intersection of reality and ideology is often employed, but never acknowledged. As at Seattle, DC, and Genoa, so too Edinburgh: the city is overrun in a well-planned influx from across the developed, Western, wealthy world to protest developed, Western, wealthy things."

While we were in the taxi going to our hotel, I noticed the Rebel Clown Army, a zany group of protesters who wore army gear, pink wigs, and face paint. One of them is quoted in the Scotsman as saying: “We are not nasty protesters that throw bricks or break windows. We want to make people happy.”

Well, horray! While I'm still not sure what to make of clowns, that helps.

However, not everyone was quite so jovial. One of the protesters told the Scotsman, “We are all eponymous individuals, we are here on our own. This event is about fun and music...but I don’t have any problem with damaging property. I am here today because I am against oppression, hierarchy, and money.”

Hmmm, I think I understand. Actually, no I don’t. Eponymous? Still scratching my head over that one.

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