INDY500
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Let's compare and contrast shall we?
This Is What A Mob Looks Like - Page 1 - Ann Coulter - Townhall Conservative
This Is What A Mob Looks Like
I am not the first to note the vast differences between the Wall Street protesters and the tea partiers. To name three: The tea partiers have jobs, showers and a point.
Tea partiers didn't block traffic, sleep on sidewalks, wear ski masks, fight with the police or urinate in public. They read the Constitution, made serious policy arguments, and petitioned the government against Obama's unconstitutional big government policies, especially the stimulus bill and Obamacare.
Then they picked up their own trash and quietly went home. Apparently, a lot of them had to be at work in the morning.
In the two years following the movement's inception, the Tea Party played a major role in turning Teddy Kennedy's seat over to a Republican, making the sainted Chris Christie governor of New Jersey, and winning a gargantuan, historic Republican landslide in the 2010 elections. They are probably going to succeed in throwing out a president in next year's election.
That's what democracy looks like.
Sorting Out the ‘Extremists’ - Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online
The difference between Wall Street protestors and the Tea Party
Brian Phillips is the head of communications for the NYC General Assembly, the group primarily responsible for occupying Wall Street. “My political goal,” Phillips says, “is to overthrow the government.”
Now, he’s not advocating violence or dictatorship. No, he just wants the government to work on the same non-hierarchical, consensus-based, extremely deliberative form of direct democracy that they’re using down in Liberty Plaza. How that would work for some 300 million Americans remains a bit of a mystery.
The reason I bring this up is that I think this is extreme.
“Extreme” is a funny word these days. It’s often used by mainstream news outlets to describe the tea parties and the tea-party-friendly caucus in the GOP.
For instance, when those hotheads in tricorn hats were trying to get the government to borrow slightly less than 40 cents for every dollar Washington spends, the conventional wisdom among enlightened liberals, the Obama administration, and the other usual suspects was that they were “extremists.”
Meanwhile, the sock-headed spokesman for the protesters wants to “overthrow the government.”
Another criticism of the tea parties has been that they are an “astroturf” organization funded by the nefarious Koch Brothers and other right-wing groups. And there’s some truth to that. Conservative groups — opposed to Wall Street bailouts, mind you — did join the tea-party cause after it was up and running.
We are now seeing the same thing with Big Labor and the progressive wing of the Democratic party. They’re backing the protesters in ever larger numbers. But don’t expect cries of astroturfing any time soon.
The Left’s Pathetic Tea Party - Rich Lowry - National Review Online
The Left’s Pathetic Tea Party
In the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Left thinks it might have found its own tea party.
MoveOn.org and some unions have embraced the protesters. The left-wing Campaign for America’s Future is featuring them at its conference devoted to reinvigorating progressivism. Liberal opinion-makers have celebrated them — Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne welcomes their spirit, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof compares them, astonishingly enough, to the demonstrators at Egypt’s Tahrir Square.
This is a sign either of desperation to find anyone on the left still energized after three years of Hope and Change, or of a lack of standards, or both.
The Right’s tea party had its signature event at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial where everyone listened politely to patriotic exhortations and picked up their trash and went home. The Left’s tea party closed down a major thoroughfare in New York City — the Brooklyn Bridge — and saw its members arrested in the hundreds.
What was remarkable about the Right’s tea party is that it depended on solid burghers who typically don’t have the time or inclination to protest anything. Occupy Wall Street is a project of people who do little besides protest. It’s all down to a standard operating procedure: the guitars, the drums, the street theater, the age-old chants. If the perpetual rallying cry of demonstrators is to be believed, “the whole world” does little else than “watch” activists stage protests.
The Tea Party had such an impact because it had a better claim on the middle of America than its adversaries. It wrapped itself in our history and patriotic trappings. It plugged in to the political system and changed the course of the country in the 2010 elections. The Left went from denying it, to ridiculing it, to envying it.
Occupy Wall Street is toxic and pathetic, the perfect distillation of an American Left in extremis.
A few articles from the conservative POV to kick off the festivities. Feel free to post articles that either explain or praise the Occupy Wall St protests.