As Orrin Judd notes, President Obama — and the MSM — “playing with fire” by endorsing Occupy Wall Street. At the Weekly Standard, Daniel Helper notes the horrible optics for the president from the following photo and headline juxtaposition on the front page of the Washington Post:
The front page of Saturday’s Washington Post featured a story titled “Obama looks to harness anti-Wall St. angst” directly below a picture of a wild-looking protester strangling a police officer with this caption: “A man affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street protests tackles a police officer during a march in New York. Police arrested 15 people during demonstrations Friday, but the movement gained a victory after a plan to clear people from a Manhattan park was halted.”
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Yesterday, the president claimed that Martin Luther King would have supported Occupy Wall Street. And while Duffman says a lot of things, Tina Korbe reminds readers that at least early in his career, MLK was much more respectful of private citizens than either BHO or OWS:
Then, too, it seems the protesters are looking less for work as they are for the material benefits of work. They fail to see that excellence is its own reward. But Martin Luther King Jr. upheld the dignity of work itself. Can you imagine an OWS protester saying what MLK Jr. said in his address at the Institute of Non-violence and Social Change in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1956?
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lives a great street sweeper who did his job well.
Contrast that quote with this:
24 protesters were arrested when a mob stormed a LaGuardia Place Citibank and shouted slogans as two demonstrators closed their bank accounts in protest just after 2 p.m.
“[The protesters] all went in a big flash mob to close their accounts,” said Adrielle Slaugh,a 24-year-old office manager who saw the clash. “There were about 30 of them. They were screaming and chanting while they were going in. Security told them to leave, but they didn’t. They stood in a group chanting things to the tellers. There were locked in, and then they were taken away.”
She said when they were locked inside, they were “pressing on the door — you could see them banging on the glass.”
Unless today’s bank tellers make a whole lot more than I did when I worked as one fresh out of college, it takes a lot of chutzpah — and a distinct lack of brain power to terrorize those on the bottom rung of the business world, if your goal is to demonstrate solidarity with average employees.
Meanwhile, Ace and Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters respectively, ask two questions, about which, I think we already know the anwers. Noel asks, “Will Media Report Racism and Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street Protests?” Ace wants to know, if the media will report on the overwhelmingly socialist/Marxist caste of protests?
No, the Victorian Gentleman that is the collective MSM has too much invested in the OWS gang to not portray them as a well-dressed, well-scrubbed United Colors of Benetton ad writ large.
Related: “It’s one thing to have suspicions. It’s another thing to have them confirmed. And for that, I’m grateful for Occupy Wall Street.”
Obama can’t help but endorse OWS … he _is_ OWS. As I wrote in comment to one of your early posts on the protests back on Oct 5th:
“There is very little difference between their crackpot economic theories and those of Obama’s tenuous grasp of economics, as evidenced by Obama’s recent tirade against Bank of America.”
I prefaced that by saying: “It’s a grave tactical mistake for the mainstream media to give these protesters so much coverage.”
The more coverage the MSM gives the mewling brain trusts pounding their bongo drums and flapping their jaws, the more similarities people are going to notice between OWS and BHO, as well as the more chances like the bad optics above to occur. But, like Obama, the MSM simply can’t help themselves either. _They’re_ the OWS, too!
I agree. If Obama wasn’t looting America from inside the Oval Office and Air Force 1, I am confident he would be out there, front and center, exhorting the masses to demand free stuff as reparations for their “victimization” or something. OWS is just ACORN with a different acronym. These are his kind of self-righteous, self-serving people; they are Barack Obama.
Write your senators, congressmen and women. Write letters to the editors of local and major newspapers in your state. If you have had enough of the nonsense of the Obama administration, express your views to as many as possible.