Moe Lane

I can’t tell for the life of me how Aaron Gell of the New York Observer was appalled by the level of sophistication, awareness, and/or revolutionary consciousness being shown by those goofy kids up there protesting Wall Street:

“What are you doing here?” we asked.

“Oh, we’re just here, like, you know, protesting what’s going on,” she replied.

“Cool, what specifically?” we asked.

“Everything going on, I mean. Take your pick!”

Her name was Jenna. We secretly hoped she was from Portland.

I mean, you can read it equally easily as being an appalled These kids are making a mockery of our country’s desperate need to put everybody on Wall Street into a giant wicker man and set it on fire in order to appease the incomprehensible Money Demons** or an amused appalled Wow, so this is what it’s like to think “these damn dirty hippies need to go find a real job.  Either way works for me, and while I wouldn’t wish the mindset of the former interpretation on my worst enemy I also have zero sympathy for anybody who embraces such a strange and frankly self-destructive worldview on their own***.  So, really, win for me either way.

Via Hot Air Headlines, which found the same quote hilarious.

Moe Lane

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This is the way WI protests end.
This is the way WI protests end.
This is the way WI protests end.

(Via Instapundit) Not with a bang, but with a bunch of self-indulgent whining as the adults in the room get on with the state of Wisconsin’s business.

Hmm. Doesn’t really scan.

Moe Lane

PS: The entire Wisconsin protest thing would have been a lot more impressive in the old days, before we saw what groups like the Tea Party could do AND SUSTAIN.

Odd in that it – like the May recess, come to think about it – came and went without a plethora of stories about how citizens flooded* town halls across the land to ritually burn the Republicans at the stake over Paul Ryan’s Medicare/budget reform plan.  Which is actually quite surprising, given that we were more or less promised Armageddon along those lines.  Almost as surprising as the lack of stories of Democrats capitalizing on their supposed killer political advantage by holding their own town halls.  Instead, we got… nothing much, really.  Dribs and drabs, but nothing special.

Then again, I lie: this is not surprising.  The Organized Left’s greatest problem is that it has everything that it needs for a populist movement except for actual people; and they’re constitutionally incapable of spawning protests that are organic, self-organizing, self-sufficient, and capable of growth.  And every time that they get distracted enough that protesting slips from from the top of their to-do list, it shows.

Moe Lane

*For a given value of ‘flooded.’  By Tea Party standards even the Easter ‘protests’ were more like a slow-draining sink.

Yeah, sure, from their plumage they’re apparently Code Pinkers, which is a group that I avoid comparing to pond scum mostly because pond scum doesn’t deserve the comparison, but since when do cops get to put hands on the throats of people who aren’t, you know, attacking them or anything?

I mean, seriously. You take a swing at a cop, the cop smacks you to the ground, that’s how it works. No beef there. But was this really proper procedure? – I ask mostly because I might feel like dancing at the Jefferson Memorial some day, and the last time I checked there are supposed to be some pretty hefty Constitutional protections in place to allow me to do it.

I think that the US Park Police needs to review/update its training procedures.

Moe Lane

PS: To reiterate… to hell with Code Pink. I hope that they win their court case, get a buck in damages, and have to pay their own court costs.

Good God but this hurts my head:

If you can’t watch that video, it’s of the San Francisco protest against Obama… which had freaking everybody. And I mean everybody: they had the full protest spectrum out*. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard conservatives chant “Hey hey ho ho: Barbara Boxer’s got to go.” At least, I think that’s what they were chanting.

Fausta also links to Zombie, who has more pictures of the protest. The very, very surreal protest.

Moe Lane (more…)

Yes, I used “Web 2.0″ to describe something. Sue me.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers. I do actually have a suggested link for you, this time: a little project that you may or may not find amusing…

Instapundit linked to an article about the Tea Parties, and the tech that they’re using:

Anti-stimulus tea parties light up Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and social media

In the latest example of how user-produced media can capture so-called “massively-shared” events in a way mainstream media can’t, a wave of images, blog posts and videos from a nationwide protest has been washing across the Web. The protests, dubbed “tea parties” by participants, were held Friday in several U.S. cities including Portland and Washington, D.C. as a response to what demonstrators see as unfettered spending and encroaching government as represented by President Obama’s economic recovery plans.

[snip]

Though even a year ago it would’ve been a slow and difficult process to chronicle a widely scattered protest such as this, the online community is now mastering the art of high-speed media sharing, a trend that can unite geographically disparate communities via the Web. Much of the sharing is now facilitated by the fast-growing messaging site Twitter, where today the keyword “teaparty” was one of the most frequently used terms. Users sent out a flurry of updates about attendance, links to photos on Flickr and Photobucket, and videos on YouTube and other sites.

The protests appeared to be rather small and did not attract much coverage in the mainstream new media. But interested observers had a remote window into the activities taking place in cities such as Tulsa, Okla., Austin, Texas, Nashville, Chicago, Lansing, Mich., Houston, Hartford, Conn., and Los Angeles, where a group that gathered this morning on the Santa Monica pier. (This blog reports that, as a part of that action, former “Saturday Night Live” actor Victoria Jackson read the definition of “socialism”).

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Contemplate the quote below before you snicker.

“How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever someone upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever someone upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American Flag?”
“We have jobs.” said Andy.

-P. J. O’Rourke

Which tells you two things:

1. It’s in the Left’s best interests to keep the unemployment rate down… oops.
2. Don’t let the time that elapses between the emergency session to pass a bill and the leisurely signing of it four days later include a national holiday. People get those off.

Via Little Miss Atilla – sorry, no CPAC again for me this year – we’re told that there are actually going to be protests against this monstrosity of a Democratic debt bill tomorrow in both Denver and Seattle. Check out Michelle Malkin and Redistributing Knowledge for further details. Will it be large? Don’t know. Will it be mocked? Almost certainly, as only people who know that you have to squash populist resentment quick before it breeds can do it. Will it be worth it? Yes. Will you be there, or do something of your own down the line?

Well… that’s up to you, isn’t it?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.