While the media talking heads are still gabbing about the greatness of President Obama’s inauguration, few, if any, are mentioning the purple inauguration ticket holders, who were stuffed thru Washington D.C.’s 3rd street tunnel hoping to see the Obama inauguration. 

A Facebook group titled “Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom” is for individuals who attempted to attend the inauguration with purple tickets and their January 20th horror stories (h/t American Thinker Larrey Anderson).  Here are a few from this morning.  (my emphasis throughout:)

A poster at 1:32am wrote:

Perhaps what infuriates me most is the ongoing denial of the scale of the problem. My personal estimate is that as many as 40,000 ticket holders were trapped in the tunnel (I was one of them). My brother-in-law and I are both Californians, and Feinstein will be hearing from us.

Being a lefty Facebook group, some are holding on to the notion that the Bush admininstration made them suffer in the "Purple Tunnel of Doom"

A poster at 7:36am wrote:

Sorry, this was such a disaster and it so could have been prevented I don't believe it was an accident. Call me a cynic, but it looks to me like it was one last parting shot from the Bush Administration and his minions to make it look like fewer people attended the ceremony!

However, another poster at 9:07am seems to disagree with this assessment.

i think all the people blaming Bush are being willfully ignorant. The inauguration was handled by the following agencies: Presidential Inaugural Committee, (Obama), JCCIC (Dianne Feinstein, D-CA), US Capitol Police (I believe under CAO, which is under Nancy Pelosi), and the DC Metro Police (under Adrian Fenty, Democrat and big Obama supporter). 

A poster at 6:38am wrote:

Waited forever..what a mess from 3am I should have stayed home but I wanted to be part of history. I def got what a wanted in more ways then one.

A poster wrote at 5:56 am:

like most of the thousands of loyal supporters turned away from the gates on the morning of Jan. 20, what we had hoped would be the most exciting day of our lives, the culmination of a year of hard work and great expense, became the most frustrating . We spent 5 hours in the idiots/honest folks BLUE LINE to NOWHERE. Our Inauguration experience was watching the gates slam closed in our face, neither seeing nor hearing the ceremony. We met not a single figure of authority to reign in the thousands of gate crashers, nor a volunteer who could have explained what we learned hours later: the security machine quit working for more than 90 minutes, so there was no possibility we'd get in. If we had known, we could have made it to the Mall and at least watched on tv. The ultimate irony was seeing pictures of all the celebs comfortably sitting in the front rows watching the proceedings we never got to see, while we, the people who put Barack in office, were on the sidelines!!!!!!!

A poster at 3:38 am had an epiphany for a moment and realized the wonders of the private sector.  This individual wrote:

In the next Inauguration, why don't we make sure that this gets outsourced to a professional company that knows what they are doing. Congress, the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police could be replaced with a professional management team and renta cops. It would be a great improvement. And you could do it at a much less expensive cost.

The Washington Post has a poll up as to how purple ticket holders should be compensated as well as information on souvenir packages that Sen.Dianne Feinstein has just promised to blue and purple ticket holders.

A Facebook poster wrote at 6:31am dissatisfaction with the compensation.

a packet with pictures?...this is supposed to be a compensation?...no thank you.

A post from Free Republic commenter “bert” mentioned that in 2005, he was also turned away from the Bush inauguration.  However, the reason involved liberals too.

I am one of those folks except I was unable to enter the ticketed area for the second Bush Inaugural. The reason was a very large [crowd] of outraged moonbats that blocked sidewalks and severely retarded walking traffic flow.

A 2005 AP report corroborates this Freeper’s post:

Police said at least 10 people were arrested during the inaugural ceremonies. Sgt. Scott Fear of the U.S. Park Police said four women who were protesting the wearing of furs were arrested after they disrobed in the near-freezing temperatures.

District of Columbia police said they had to use pepper spray to break up a "push and shoving match" between officers and protesters near the start of the parade. A police spokesman said at least one officer was slightly injured.

Police and witnesses said a security checkpoint near the White House was briefly shut down after being blocked by protesters.

Blogger Ed Driscoll emailed me and said, "That if it were a GOP inauguration, the MSM would go crazy over a story like that."  No doubt it would still be a story on the TV news shows today.

“The purple tunnel of doom” could very well be a metaphor for Obama’s America.  Excited, hopeful, energetic people who were promised something wonderful and sacrificed their time, treasure, and energy to join him in D.C. on January 20th.  Unfortunately, they were stuck in D.C.’s purple tunnel of doom instead.

*UPDATE: Facebook Administrators of the group, "Purple Tunnel of Doom" are already deleting some of the posts that I have listed here.

**Updated with Drisocoll quote

Cross posted at wordpress.picketlines.com