Astroturf on literal parade: Occupy DC agitator admits to paying protesters.

The Daily Caller has some entertaining video up of a ‘Occupy DC organizer’ admitting that some of the spontaneous voluntary protesters that he has in tow – ones, not even incidentally, that are more, ah, diverse than the baseline of ‘pasty-faced white twenty-something hipster who’s seriously underwater in his/her liberal arts degree student debt’ – are actually being paid to show up and wave signs in a language that is perhaps not the mother tongue of the country of their birth*.

Let’s go over a few of the things suggested by this video. Kudos for the Daily Caller for sending in a reporter who could speak Spanish, by the way: that was just entertainingly nasty, and probably what forced the admission in the first place.

First off, and the most serious point: if you’re wondering why on earth the guy in the video above is even willing to admit that some of his squad of ‘volunteers’ were not actually volunteers, you shouldn’t. From his point of view – which is to say, the point of view of the activist Left – of course you pay people to pad out your numbers, if you have to. Everybody does that. I mean, it’s great if there are enough motivated people out there to swell your crowd, but you still budget to bring in more folks anyway. This is one major reason why the activist Left is so infuriated with the Tea Party movement, by the way: many of them honestly and truly believe that the groups are being subsidized and funded directly from major corporations, and they legitimately don’t understand why this isn’t being exposed in the media**. So… sure, everybody does it, so why not admit to it?

Second… now, I may be jumping to conclusions, here, in assuming that at least one of the individuals in that video may not even have a green card. But I’m going to take that chance and state that, while I am of course a notorious pro-amnesty immigration squish, it’s at times like these that I can understand the attitudes of my more hard-nosed colleagues. I mean, look at that. There are plenty of aforementioned American twentysomething hipsters – at that very rally – who would have been darned glad to get the job of holding up a sign and woodenly repeating random progressive pablum. But they didn’t get those jobs, did they? And if you’re a fellow immigration squish who’s thinking that I’m being too hardline, consider this: by any objective standard an illegal Mexican immigrant willing to work three jobs is of more practical value to the country than a twenty seven year old inconveniently tattooed former barista with a Masters degree in semiotics. Let the latter carry the darn signs, and free up the former for more useful work.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*And more importantly, the country that would issue their passports.  If they have passports.  Which they may not actually have.

**Sure, you know and I know that the answer to that is that you can’t wave around a Bloody Check that doesn’t actually exist, but this is the Activist Left that we’re talking about, here. They have a narrative that they need to let them sleep at night, and it’s perilous to challenge it. For a given value of ‘perilous.’