The Democrats and the mainstream media are enthusiastically embracing the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) folks, comparing them favorably to those hated “Tea Partiers.” That’s ludicrous. The Tea Party was (and still is) totally focused on repealing ObamaCare and pushing back against President Obama’s Czar-filled big government agenda. In the summer of 2010, Tea Partiers gathered hundreds of thousands strong on the National Mall, made patriotic speeches, sang songs, and uttered a few prayers. They then picked up all the trash, went home and voted both Republicans and Democrats out of office, replacing them with people they felt better understood the need for a more limited, fiscally responsible government.
Number of Tea Partier’s arrested: zero.
In an article in The American Thinker (10/17/2011), J.R. Dunn notes that a better comparison to these undisciplined, group-chanting, OWS folks is the radical rebel crowd who stormed the 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago and got their heads bloodied in the process. Dunn notes that in 1968, the Democrats were totally in charge of the government as had mostly been since the days of FDR. Liberalism was the establishment that the 1960s kids were protesting against.
For years liberals had been trying to co-opt the youth revolt for their own purposes. Lyndon Johnson promised them cradle-to-grave welfare through The Great Society programs. But Johnson also gave them the Vietnam War, and that was a bridge too far. In November 1968, the voters took the full measure of both the radical protestors and their erstwhile Democrat allies and gave Richard Nixon a huge victory over Hubert Humphrey. The Democrat Party has never fully recovered from that 1968 debacle.
Now we have Democrat politicians and unions embracing the OWS protests while practicing “crony capitalism” with Wall Street. How will that end for Democrats?
Jim Littlejohn
Concerned Coastal Voters
Gualala, CA
