Prior to the Occupy Wallstreet protests, there has been an ongoing protest at the White House that exemplifies the type of movement that I feel best represents the opposite of the Tea Party - the Keystone Pipeline protest.
Day after day, white collar intelligent Americans have been staging sit-ins at the White House to demonstrate against the potential construction and impacts of a large pipeline from Canada to Texas. You can watch a video here of the typical activities of these protesters, and what the response has been.
These area the typical affluent yuppie leftists protesting, in the standard mode of utter intellectual stupefaction and educational emptiness that defines such people and their approach to such issues.
Are they civil? Well, for the most part (there were upwards of 117 arrests during the protests, again, something virtually unknown at Tea Party rallies), and this is
very rare for any such protest on the Left in either recent years or within my lifetime (and let's not pretend that this shirt and tie outing has not been carefully planned to weed out the very types of people who usually comprise the vast majority of protesters as similar events in the historic past). Who are they? Tools of the same environmental movement that squats at the bottom of the very reason the Keystone pipeline is desperately needed: the critical deterioration of America's energy infrastructure and a more than thirty year hiatus of new construction of traditional or nuclear energy generation infrastructure, including any new petroleum refining and distribution capacity in well over three decades.
These are the same intellectually dumbed down boomer and post-boomer children of the modern public school system, mainstream news journalism, and the PC academy, driven by emotion and images of their own moral grandiosity who have swallowed the AGW Kool-aid hook, line, and tackle box, who believe the earth is "overpopulated," who believe McDonald's food is toxic and addictive, who think microwave ovens create poisonous food; who think hairspray cans are destroying the Ozone layer, the oceans are dying, the last tree will soon disappear from the earth, that GM foods pose an apocalyptic science fiction danger to the environment, that it is far better to let upwards of some 96,000,000 people in the Third World die, since 1973, of an easily preventable disease than to spray clothing and houses with an otherwise harmless substance known as DDT, and that we can dismantle our carbon based economy and run it, at present or higher levels of NIMBY affluence with wind, solar, and biomass.
While the Tea Party still is, despite Leftist blogger conspiratorial fulminations to the contrary, a grassroots, broad based uprising of "the people" (the kind the Left has long wished it could actually create but never can), who, less the hypocritical posturing about the pipline protesters, is actually behind them? That's right, the entire cultural and political Left, headed by its most extreme, outer fringes. Bill McKibbon, James Hansen, MoveOn.org, Rainforest Action Network, anti-capitalist (except for herself) eastern Ruling Class leftist author Naomi Klein, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the notorious Union of Concerned Scientists In other words, the far, outer fringes of discourse regarding these issues, among which are the richest and most politically powerful radical watermelon environmental groups in the world, put together a protest over the Internet and through direct mailings. When leftists, neo-Maxists, neo-communists, and militant neo-primitivist ideologues put together such an event, its legitimate and indicative of "democracy in action." When conservatives do it, Chomskiesque conspiracy theories begin to fly.
Its just the same old garden variety anti-intellectualism and hypocrisy of which the Left is, by definition, made. More ideologically tightly wound Astro Turf masquerading as broad based Tea Party grassroots organizing.
Now, the Tea Party stands for sympathy for the very things it began in protest of - sympathy for a Wall Street that invented monopoly money schemes like CDO's and default swaps that exacerbated the damage of the housing bubble collapse, sympathy for the banks that viewed the government organizations like Freddy and Fanny as a safety net allowing them to gamble with no risk while every American home owner has lost a significant amount of wealth represented by the value of their homes, sympathy for rapidly rising unregulated health care costs bore by American companies and their employees at the expense of insurance company profits, sympathy for the guys paying for the message.
You're so completely out of the loop intellectually regarding either the conservative intellectual or grassroots movements, and the attitudes and philosophy of these movements, broadly speaking, regarding the issues you mention, that I highly doubt serious discussion of them with you is possible, at the present time. You've probably got years of serious reading and education in front of you before you'll be able to discuss these concepts substantively. Get away for MoveOn.org. the
Daily Kos, the
Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now! and Keith Olbermann, and start doing some serous reading and study, both deep and broad.
You're not a patriot, Droopy. You're a purchased agent of this non-governmental "other" that is very willing to have bought your allegiance at the expense of your love for country.
You're a sell-out, Droops. Own it. You're paying for it already as are we all.
Get rid of the Chomski, Zinn, and Moore and begin moving down the path of a liberal, serious education. I can't possibly take you seriously after the stuff you've posted above.