My mother told me that if I ever want to make a political statement by driving farm machinery into the pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, I should make sure that my manifesto is clearly printed and distributed to media outlets beforehand.
This nutcase who has been sitting in the middle of a pond on the mall for over 24 hours is more than an annoyance. The Park Police called for the closing of these buildings:
• The National Academy of Science
• The Federal Reserve Board
• South Annex of the Interior Dept.
The streets around these buildings are closed and only pedestrian traffic is allowed:
• State Department
• Department of Interior
• Office of Personnel Management
(They couldn’t really close the State Department today, could they?)
The thousands of Federal Employees who work in the closed buildings are told to stay home on “administrative leave”, at the expense of taxpayers.
A few years ago, a man was threatening to jump into the Potomac from a bridge on the beltway. The police closed the entire bridge for hours bringing rush hour traffic to a standstill. It caused unimaginable delays for thousands of commuters.
Right now we are two hours away from the third nightmare commute caused by this one crazy tobacco farmer on a tractor.
It’s so easy to bring the DC area to its knees that I think it’s about time to rethink this policy of endless negotiations in a standoff.
This is truely Theater of the Absurd. He’s right out in the open, can’t they just hit him with a tranquilizer dart?
I’m a little annoyed, myself. I heard someone had driven a tractor into the mall and I was expecting to see something like this, not that puny little yard machine.
Oops. My apologies. It appears as if he’s taken over downtown DC in an effort to bring attention to the plight of tobacco farmers, whom he thinks are subject to unfair government policies.
Great timing there, Dwight Ware Watson.
The Washington Post just scored an interview with the fellow, who is still sitting in the middle of the duck pond and appears to be willing to go at least another day. Here’s what he had to say:
In other words, the fucker’ll quit when he runs out of Winstons.
I don’t get the strategy here. “Help the poor cancer-stick farmers or we’ll pull crazy shit and inconvenience untold millions of people and screw up the Capitol of our nation on the verge of war!”
Unless you understand the plight of the North Carolina tobacco farmer than please keep your mealy-mouth comments to yourself. No I don’t approve of smoking, I quit last July after smoking for 30 years so I know it’s a bad bad habit and health-wise it kills. But this is more than about growing tobacco. You need to know the history behind what the government has done to these farmers.
I have plenty of sympathy for farmers being screwed over by governments. I have close family ties to a farm, and I have a pretty good understanding, though not of tobacco farming. I’m all behind protesting. I’m just unimpressed by the size of this guy’s tractor, is all. It’s tiny!
So? Maybe growing poison for a living(which is what tobacco is) is a bad idea, huh? In any event keep your loony tune mudhopppers in your backwater state so they don’t screw up our commute to work!
Maybe the farmers, the real welfare queens, should stop living off of government subsidies and start to work. It sickens me, just because they can’t turn a profit they have to whine to the gov’t and sit there, not attempting to change professions like most people do.
(And yes, it took be forever to get up to Bethesda tonight from Capitol Hill)
Okay, twerp, how about this? Because of global political reality, if the only people in America who grew food were those who could turn a profit doing so, you wouldn’t be eating tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or the night after that. Sure, subsidies should be cut back, because it’s the subsidies (and not just those of any one government, but those of half the world) that cause the depressed commodity prices, which make it the case that input costs exceed the value of the crops. Calling farmers welfare queens is fucking ignorant, since they work hard to perform a service society needs a whole hell of a lot more than some schmuck pushing paper in DC. You obviously don’t know shit about agriculture.