Sunday, October 09, 2011

Not exactly storming the Bastille

A zombie takes a break from Occupying to chow down on some pizza
One of the odder stories out of the Days of Rage/Occupy Wall Street protest was Saturday's attempt to storm the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The demonstrators tried to enter the museum with placards and banners, were told those were not allowed, got in a scuffle with the guards and ended up getting pepper sprayed.

Early reports didn't say why the museum had been targeted. Later it was reported that yet another protest group, this one calling itself Rage Against the Machine, was attempting to protest an exhibit about drone aircraft at the museum. The new name is irrelevant, it is clear to one and all that this group is just another facet of Days of Rage/Occupy Wall Street.

It has been entertaining watching the media trying to spin the protests as as something new and wondrous under the sun and as a spontaneous eruption of the grief of the average American. To buy that is to ignore that obvious -- that these are just boilerplate leftist protests. 

Gateway Pundit has video from the Smithsonian protest. If you watch it you've seen it all before, the combination of geriatric old hippies and student anarchists with a leavening of unionistas chanting "shame, shame, shame" and "the whole world is watching" as they try to occupy a public space. It is the same template as Wisconsin earlier this spring. In fact, the woman who got pepper sprayed at the Smithsonian today was from Madison, Wisconsin.

One of the problems they face is that, no matter how many times they duck the questions about what they stand for, they can't conceal just how incoherent their message is. If you're mad at the Wall Street bailout shouldn't you be mad at the President and Party that delivered it? If you're oppressed by crony capitalism shouldn't the name Solyndra appear on your signs? In the name of social justice shouldn't the hundreds of Mexican casualties from stimulus funded guns be decried?

Of course, none of that is on the tips of their tongues. Instead, when asked you get a litany of bad student loans, foreclosures and their unemployment running out. Something tells me the so-called 99% are protesting to get me to get a second job to pay for their fiscal stupidity.

It is October, the Unions will spend their money but the weather will still turn. In a few weeks the crowds will dribble away from Zuccotti Park until only the bums and dead-ender protesters are the ones still there. It won't matter. It will only mean that the moveable feast has moved on.

Finally, here's a sickening thought to end this post -- when Jimmy Carter lost he was put to pasture because he had no constituency left, but if Obama loses he'll still be a political entity because of these nincompoops. Just imagine all the fun and games that will lead to.
  

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