Actually, it was a response more to voyager’s post #2 - no cites, no evidence; the Tea Party was totally ginned up, not at all spontaneous. Because the Tea Party conflicts with the politics of 90% of the lefties on this board, therefore nobody challenges it. Because of course, Americans can’t, simply can’t, be getting frustrated with the size of government and the increasing dystopia that results from it. Everyone knows that an increased Federal Government footprint is the answer to all problems.
Consider this my (successful) experiment, to continue to take the pulse of liberalism and the intellectual honesty present in Great Debates.
What? Were you not given a link that proved corporate sponsorship of the Tea Party right out of the gate? These gotcha games (that righties don’t even seem to be good at anymore) have grown tiresome.
Which, incidentally, is one of the driving forces behind the Occupiers. That said…
These are tiny protests that probably don’t deserve the attention they’re getting. Especially because we’re in week two or three of this thing and it’s still not very clear what the Occupiers want.
The Tea Party got a lot of voters out in the midterms to elect conservative candidates, mainly in the House, but they royally screwed the GOP in the Senate, where they kicked out solidly conservative candidates in the primaries, candidates who had good chances to win in the general, and voted in whacky candidates who ended up losing in November.
But they were waaaaaaay more organized than the Occupiers are, and the latter will have to do some serious organizing if they want to get particular candidates on the ballot and/or elected. It’s still early, though, so we shall see.
Tea Party - SourceWatch The tea baggers are not spontaneous at all. They have been directed from the beginning and directed by Armey and other right wing funders. They have had press coverage far bigger than their rallies deserve.
The occupiers are only in about 900 cities around the world. The first few weeks they got practically no coverage and faced derision 24 hrs a day at Fox and all the many, many deadhead right wing stations on Tv and radio.
You’re not exactly Mr. Smash the Lefties Over the Head with Endless Reams of Irrefutable Citations from Respectable Sources yourself. And I say that with a smile on my face, because you are an entertaining guy.
As is often stated here, a gratuitous assertion is equally gratuitously denied.
Given the size of the protests (they are relatively very small) I do think they’re getting too much coverage.
As for what they stand for, honestly I don’t know. I’m not sure they know. The 50 or so people in Chicago didn’t seem to know and I stopped and asked two of them.
With winter coming my guess is that they are going to fade away.
Jeez - anyone with any memory knows that Fox didn’t just report on Tea Party rallies, they pre-announced the rallies. I wonder if he wants a cite that it gets cold in winter also.
I hope they don’t create new candidates the way the Tea Party did. They’d be very useful if they gave people who are angry and frustrated a way of supporting change which doesn’t make the problem worse. This will be independents, and not those who want to take the country back from you know who. If they stiffen the backbone of the Dems, that is a plus right there.
In the Times article on what Wall Street really thinks about the Occupation, one rich banker is quoted as being quite angry at the 2 Democratic Senators from New York, who, he said, don’t realize who their true constituents are - that is the Wall Streeters who give them money. That sums up very nicely what the uproar is all about.
This is exactly what will happen. Obama came out and said he fully supports the Occupiers and will be fighting for their interests. Dems that want to ride Obama’s coattails (I think the election is still his to lose at this point) will likely fall in behind him.
Thanks for the (left handed?) compliment. But Raven, let me call your bluff.
Can you honestly say that I don’t provide cites in an order of magnitude higher than those to whom I respond? Really? Go look at all my postings and cites.
You’ll notice that most of the time, I post from WaPo, NYT, etc. There’s a reason I do this - these are notoriously lefty sources. I don’t post very often from Heritage, from Cato (even those, as conservative sources, make arguments almost exclusively with numbers, not emotion like you’d see at FireDogLake, The Nation, DailyKos, Mother Jones, etc).
MediaMatters is well known as a Dem mouthpiece and propaganda organization, run by by Clinton’s buddies.
Secondly, just because Fox is reporting on events their people want to attend, does that mean that they ginned up the whole concept (which was Voyager’s contention)? That it wasn’t grass roots?
Every time MSDNC reports on Occupy Wall Street, are they ‘sponsoring’ that event?
Can you cite proof of a timeline showing Fox News started the Tea Party movement? If not, you might want to retract the comment, if only for your own credibility.
It’s called “reality”. You could look it up sometime.