So we now have dead bodies at Occupy Vancouver, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Salt Lake City, and even Occupy Burlington, Vermont. The good news is that for the moment Occupy Wall Street types seem more at risk from scrofula:
“I’m amazed that in a park full of revolutionaries, there are large contingents that can’t throw away their own trash,” said Jordan McCarthy, 22, a member of the protesters’ sanitation team.
Jordan and her fellow “revolutionaries” like to assure us that they’re the future. And in the sense that, in a post-prosperity America pox-ridden encampments of the homicidal, suicidal and narcotically inept will not seem that unusual, she may have a point. But I do hope at least a few of the celebrities who’ve endorsed the movement – Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky – get to spend the night.
Steyn, for delivering so much depressing (but entirely logical) prognostication of the decline of America you also are the writer who makes me laugh the hardest. Those lefties you mention would not last a day in the squalor of their fellow "revolutionaries", and the very idea of seeing the celebrity left living in a tent surrounded by the mass of lunacy as opposed to their servants, lawyers, etc. cracks me up.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere was a death at Occupy Bloomington last weekend, as well.
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None of these deaths were due to the Occupy Movement. One (in Oakland) was totally unrelated and the others were self-inflicted. If there had been deaths at Tea Party gatherings from wheelchair malfunctions or lack of diabetes medicine, you couldn't blame those on the gatherings themselves.
And while there weren't any well-known celebrities endorsing the Tea Party (making it harder for them to stay), you can be sure any politician who touted connections to the movement, like Michelle Bachmann, wouldn't be caught dead expressing solidarity by mingling with common people.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNice try, but the person who died in oakland had been staying at the camp.
If it's not a problem, why is a far left mayor like quan being forced to finally close it down?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf there had been deaths at Tea Party gatherings from wheelchair malfunctions or lack of diabetes medicine, you couldn't blame those on the gatherings themselves.
Correct. The blame would fall on the bigoted homo-xeno-race-i-phobes who put the rallies together, which is what happened anyway with anything that happened in the country, even though no tea party rally gave death, mayhem and disease top bill like OWS does everywhere it sticks it unshaven, unshowered, unperfumed head.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHughman,
Well, 'that' didn't work, did it? Next time, try using some real facts, and maybe some rational thought.
BTW, Republican celebrities who reportedly support the Tea Party include:
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAdam Sandler
Drew Carey
Dean Cain
Gloria Estefan
Heather Locklear
Rick Schroder
James Earl Jones
Kelsey Grammer
LL Cool J
Nick Lachey
Robert Duvall
The Rock
Sammy Hagar
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Alice Cooper
Jon Voight
Jessica Simpson
Shannen Doherty
Stephen Baldwin
Susan Lucci
Sylvester Stallone
Meat Loaf
Tom Selleck
Bruce Willis
etc
hughman, hughman, hughman:
You make the elementary error of assuming that the facts matter to either the authors or the vast majority of commenters here at NRO.
This is the mission should you choose to accept it: Focus on it. The mission is to connect the OWS to anything negative while ignoring the message. Let me repeat. The mission is to connect OWS to anything negative while ignoring the message.
This is nothing more than an ad hominen attack on a larger than usual scale. The people here at NRO want to make the protests about anything except what is actually being protested. So, they rely on elementary extreme over-generalization and on making logically fallacious and spurious connections to unrelated phenomena in order to paint a twisted picture of reality that they find more congenial.
And here you are arguing facts.
You obviously didn't get the memo.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAwww - one troll consoling/instructing another! That really sends a thrill up my leg!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHere is a memo with some facts in it you might have missed:
There is plenty of documentation of the Occupiers defecating on a police car, selling illegal drugs, shouting anti-Jewish slogans, fighting with police and destroying property. The Tea Party did none of that and cleaned up after itself. You can be sure when the Occupiers quit and go back to living in their parents' basements their formerly occupied zones will look like a post-Woodstock junkyard with tons of trash to be cleaned up.
As far as the Occupiers "message" goes, aside from having their student loans forgiven and destroying capitalism, they don't have a focused message. Anarchistic, smelly, lice-ridden mobs rarely have anything in focus.
Lewis Forro
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseVirginia Beach, VA
Oh yes, the Tea Party people were such high exemplars of civilizations when they went to town hall meetings and screamed their heads off so that no one else could express themselves in a rational and cogent manner.
To name but one example.
Hilarious.
I remember the breathless defenses of the Tea Party then. It is unfair to label an entire movement based on the actions of a few bad apples, they said.
And this is what I find most amusing about Tea Party defenders. They are so blatant and crude in their hypocrisy. The stench is quite heavy.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePost a link so we can see what you're talking about. I went to many Tea Party rallies and gatherings and everything was always civil, polite and focused on freedom and responsibility. I would have been happy to take my mom, my grandma (God rest her soul), my daughter and my son there. I never heard a swear word, smelled anything horrible, worried about assault or disease, or left feeling anything but inspired, joyful, patriotic, empowered and hopeful for America's future.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo name but one example.
1.) You didn't give an example, just generalized, you lover of facts, you. Is it that hard to follow your own advice?
2.) Let's say a bunch of them "went to town hall meetings and screamed their heads off so that no one else could express themselves in a rational and cogent manner." That's worst you can come up with?
Can't you find a bunch of them pushing a 78-year-old lady down a flight of concrete steps or something?
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Or how everything has just gone to sh*t?
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Or 130ish arrests in Chicago after 175ish arrests there the week before?
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Or the 20ish arrests in Cincinnati?
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Or the 40ish arrests in Atlanta?
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Or setting someone's clothes on fire in LA?
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Or the Jr. Pee 'N Poop Patrol in California?
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This is nowhere near the extent of all the bad apples. The Occupy folks own the entire GD rotten orchard. And you - who is infatuated with facts, who can't stop talking about facts, who should get hotel room with facts - can come up with yelling as the most heinous, disgusting, outrageous, blabbedy blah blah charge against the tea party people?
Most the time I ignore your comments, but sometimes you simply have to be called out for posting the stupidest stuff imaginable.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnyone can play this game of using anecdotes to smear a protest movement.
Take these racist Tea Party signs:
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSome of those signs are mis-spelled, and some are in questionable taste -- but I don't see that any of them are "racist".
Many of them allude to Obama's Kenyan ancestry. The man IS indubitably of half-Kenyan parentage -- how is it "racist" to mention that? (I know, I know, language-Komissars such as yourself have hijacked words to mean whatever you want them to mean, with "racist" at the forefront, but still.... when a supporter of, say, Herman Cain draws attention to the President as being of half-Kenyan parentage, he is being, if anything, "geographist" -- not "racist".)
George W. Bush was regularly depicted as a chimpanzee, Mr. Welker, in posters carried by your ideological friends. Show me a poster, (held by a genuine Tea Partier), similarly depicting Obama as a chimpanzee, and then you'll have a leg to stand on. Until then, however, I suggest you find another avenue to go barking down.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Anyone can play this game..."
Lots of people did play this game. The tea party was smeared based on anecdotes - many of them fabricated or unverifiable. Because of a distinct lack of violence or crime, these smears tended to focus on the messages spoken or seen at Tea Party events. While OWS' "message" has been received, analyzed, and responded to, OWS actions are always worthy of review, don't you think?
I also like how you equate impolite signage with actual felonies, misdemeanors, deaths, and injuries. That's rather silly.
Now, there's a fair question as to whether the miscreants participating in the OWS protests can be considered reflective of the OWS protestors.
By what means can an all-inclusive, intentionally leaderless protest movement that claims to speak for the 99% actually discriminate between the 'good protestors' and the 'bad protestors'? This is a serious question. There doesn't seem to be a certification process. These people who are committing crimes are always only disavowed after the fact - or is there actually a process where OWS is identifying and casting out bad protestors in advance?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDistasteful placards are one thing, David. Violence, drug overdoses, rapes, murders, foul sanitation conditions, assaults on the elderly, and rioting are quite another.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOr do you not see that?
All you can come up with are signs and yelling? Find me the comparable arrests, genius. The defecation, the sexual assaults, the deaths.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"when they went to town hall meetings and screamed their heads off so that no one else could express themselves in a rational and cogent manner."
People were vehement at the town halls, and they were loud and animated and it wasn't a nice little book-chat, and you're clutching your pearls over THAT?
News Flash: THAT'S what democracy looks like.
"It is unfair to label an entire movement based on the actions of a few bad apples, they said."
No, we accused the MSM of blatantly lying about the Tea Parties, such as editing footage of a BLACK conservative with a rifle slung across his back so that you couldn't tell he was black, then calling it evidence that the white racist hicktards were fixin' to shoot someone.
We cried FOUL when Dems accused us first of being GOP astroturf, then of being all freaked out because there's a brotha in the White House, then of being all violent and scary, then of spitting on people but managing to avoid doing it when every one of the dozens of cameras present was pointed the other way.
We didn't claim there were "bad apples" among us; we pointed out that the Obama-Hitler posters were by LaRouchites (not conservatives) and that the others were the plants that lefties bragged they'd set in our midst to discredit us.
Are you really drawing a moral equivalence between a few questionable (and questionably questionable) pasteboard signs on the one hand and felonies, vandalism, rapes, the encouragement to not report rapes to police, shutting down ports, rioting, and other vile mob behavior?
The Tea Party rallies always got and paid for the requisite permits, left places cleaner than when they got there, and occasioned no arrests. Their message was, "listen to us or face a primary challenge." And guess what? Those who didn't listen got primaried.
OH THE HORROR!
The Occupiers obtain no permits, set up illegal encampments, generate enough squalor to enable the breakout of drug-resistant TB, occasion multiple arrests, harbor rapists and drug dealers and other nasty characters, engage in a strain of antisemitism unseen since the 1930s, threaten to topple the whole economy (cf. Michael Lerner), break windows, and hope to be as chaotic and disruptive as possible.
But hey, your tribe right or wrong, I guess.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWoodstock junkyard? How about more like what the Capitol Mall looked like after Obama's inauguration? That was the most despicable scene I have ever seen.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The mission is to connect the OWS to anything negative while ignoring the message."
What's the message? That Wall Street got bailed out and they shouldn't have?
Didn't the Tea Partiers complain about EXACTLY THE SAME THING?
Here's the difference, though: the Tea Partiers noticed all the money draining out of the treasury first through TARP and then the "stimulus" and realized that they just got stuck with an enormous tab. They yelled at the GOVERNMENT for giving OUR money away to bail out Wall Street and the auto unions and the public-sector unions.
OWS, on the other hand (three years after the bailouts) is protesting Wall Street instead of their own elected officials, who could have told Wall Street to pound sand but did not.
They're also calling for a bailout of their own. Forgive our student debts, they cry, or forgive our mortgages.
That's the message we're ignoring?
Seriously?
Give me one good reason why we SHOULDN'T ignore it.
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