re: #201 Killgore Trout

I don’t think you’re a wingnut. Like I said the other night, I was pretty infuriated to see the WWP with tables at a protest against rape, given that the WWP supported regimes that used rape as a punishment.

I think the main reason the Tea Party types didn’t get beaten down is they tended to be in parks, not occupying downtown Manhattan, and a lot of them are geriatric and you don’t want to pepper spray a dude with an oxygen tank.

However: The guys protesting at Wall Street have a real, legitimate point. The financial industry did cause the meltdown, or at least create the conditions where a meltdown was inevitable. What’s more, they’re still doing it. We have some fiscal reform from Obama, but it’s not enough, now with the GOP in charge of the house. Another meltdown can and will occur, unless we get serious about regulation.

The Tea Party, on the other hand, tends to protest things that are utterly fictional, that have no basis in reality. Or they simply attack Obama.

This rally was basically organized by the lunatic left, the ANSWER types, so kicking them out of it isn’t really a possibility. But it is possible to overwhelm them and take it away from them. That involves participation, though.

I’m not really a protester sort of guy, and after seeing the bankers drinking champagne while looking at the protests I think they may actually really be enjoying this. Or rather, the bad ones will enjoy it and the good ones already know their own culpability.

Frank linked a site set up by some organizers, and I really, really didn’t like it that they never said who they were. Astroturfing doesn’t just come from big deep pockets; if you go to a rally and chant against the bankers and feel good but don’t know that the rally was organized and sponsored by people who approved of Mao, that’s another form of astroturfing.