Oh God In Heaven Above, Not Again
Well, today was the big day- Operation American Spring, when somewhere between ten and thirty million people were going to swarm into Washington D.C. and refuse to leave until Obama, Holder, Pelosi et. al. were frogmarched out of their offices and put on trial for treason.
Well, what the hell did you expect? It looks like, after months of agitating, the organizers of this march managed to entice something on the order of 120 or 150 people to actually show up. Here are a few photos of this pathetic spectacle:
Only in the last one can you even imagine that you are looking at more than a few dozen people. I particularly like the acres of chairs set out for an audience that stayed home.
Well, I am going to avoid Green Eagle's usual derision, which he would normally deliver in ample quantity toward these very deserving targets, because there is, I think, a serious point to be made about these continuing failures. And this is the point: the right wing in this country is, by and large, a charade- a chimera created by the Republican party, and paid for by their rich backers, to create the appearance that a large part of the country is behind them.
On the left, we have had many really large protest movements over the years, including the great civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches of the sixties, which drew crowds of hundreds of thousands to Washington, and very large numbers to other cities as well. We had similar things in the Bush Administration. I remember being at a Washington march against the Iraq war a few years ago, which was attended by about 350,000 people, and which was virtually ignored by the mainstream press. The Occupy movement drew large crowds in cities all over the country, despite a vicious campaign of repression against them; criminal behavior on the part of the authorities which has never made it into the consciousness of the vast majority of Americans.
What does the right have to counter this? Really, nothing. As I have spent years documenting, the Tea Parties were very largely a bought and paid for creation of the Koch brothers and a few other rich vultures. Yet, if you ask people which was a larger movement, the vast majority of Americans would say the Tea Party, because their pathetically small marches received vast publicity in the mainstream press. This has been essential to maintaining the constantly repeated illusion that the United States is a "center right" country; the "center right" being whatever suits the interests of the rich.
Of course, a guy like Larry Klayman, the perpetrator of the last of these farces, knows fully well what is going on. With a history of creating evil mirages including leading many of the lying attacks on the Clintons, participating actively in the Swift Boat smears on John Kerry, and being one of the main promoters of the birth certificate lies, he knows what he is up to. But I don't think the suckers (now totally destroyed as credible political figures) who led today's idiocy were like Klayman. I think they really bought into the preposterous fantasies about how many people in this country were so filled with rage and hatred that they were willing to destroy the whole thing, regardless of cost.
Well, they were wrong, and we need to not be suckered like they were. It is time for all of us to stop buying into the well-financed dog and pony show put on by the right, and realize that we do hold the power- the number of people who want nothing more than a decent life for themselves and their families is vastly larger than the number who will trade their lives in on a chance to start shooting a bunch of government employees, or maybe some black people. Of course, this requires finding a way to stop the uber-greedy from buying the whole country, and perhaps generating so much suffering in the process that we really will see apocalyptic violence played out all around us by ignorant, enraged suckers who will live and die never seeing that they are nothing but tools of someone who will sacrifice them without a thought.
Well, what the hell did you expect? It looks like, after months of agitating, the organizers of this march managed to entice something on the order of 120 or 150 people to actually show up. Here are a few photos of this pathetic spectacle:
Well, I am going to avoid Green Eagle's usual derision, which he would normally deliver in ample quantity toward these very deserving targets, because there is, I think, a serious point to be made about these continuing failures. And this is the point: the right wing in this country is, by and large, a charade- a chimera created by the Republican party, and paid for by their rich backers, to create the appearance that a large part of the country is behind them.
On the left, we have had many really large protest movements over the years, including the great civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches of the sixties, which drew crowds of hundreds of thousands to Washington, and very large numbers to other cities as well. We had similar things in the Bush Administration. I remember being at a Washington march against the Iraq war a few years ago, which was attended by about 350,000 people, and which was virtually ignored by the mainstream press. The Occupy movement drew large crowds in cities all over the country, despite a vicious campaign of repression against them; criminal behavior on the part of the authorities which has never made it into the consciousness of the vast majority of Americans.
What does the right have to counter this? Really, nothing. As I have spent years documenting, the Tea Parties were very largely a bought and paid for creation of the Koch brothers and a few other rich vultures. Yet, if you ask people which was a larger movement, the vast majority of Americans would say the Tea Party, because their pathetically small marches received vast publicity in the mainstream press. This has been essential to maintaining the constantly repeated illusion that the United States is a "center right" country; the "center right" being whatever suits the interests of the rich.
Of course, a guy like Larry Klayman, the perpetrator of the last of these farces, knows fully well what is going on. With a history of creating evil mirages including leading many of the lying attacks on the Clintons, participating actively in the Swift Boat smears on John Kerry, and being one of the main promoters of the birth certificate lies, he knows what he is up to. But I don't think the suckers (now totally destroyed as credible political figures) who led today's idiocy were like Klayman. I think they really bought into the preposterous fantasies about how many people in this country were so filled with rage and hatred that they were willing to destroy the whole thing, regardless of cost.
Well, they were wrong, and we need to not be suckered like they were. It is time for all of us to stop buying into the well-financed dog and pony show put on by the right, and realize that we do hold the power- the number of people who want nothing more than a decent life for themselves and their families is vastly larger than the number who will trade their lives in on a chance to start shooting a bunch of government employees, or maybe some black people. Of course, this requires finding a way to stop the uber-greedy from buying the whole country, and perhaps generating so much suffering in the process that we really will see apocalyptic violence played out all around us by ignorant, enraged suckers who will live and die never seeing that they are nothing but tools of someone who will sacrifice them without a thought.
Comments
This IS pathetic. More people showed up for my mother's 95th Birthday last month.
The lady with the bullhorn was obviously meaning to annoy passersby, since she could have easily been heard by her total audience without it.
And somebody has to pay for the sitting-up and tearing-down of all those empty seats. hee hee
Nope.
Unlike the party protest in DC
You must also consider the financiers of this march, which include FreedomWorks, the National Taxpayers Union, The Heartland Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform. Freedom Works and the Heartland Institute are largely funded by the Koch Brothers (surprise, surprise,) and the other two are run by Reagan operative and dirty trickster Grover Norquist, supporter of just about every pro-rich people campaign that ever moved through Washington, and a close associate of the crook Jack Abramoff.
Besides being created and funded by these guys, this march was massively promoted throughout the right wing media, including of course on Fox News, and still couldn't attract the crowd gathered by an impromptu event organized by two comedians, let alone the 350,000 or so that showed up a couple of years earlier to protest the Iraq war, and event almost totally ignored by the mainstream media.
And since then, despite the lavish expenditure of funds by rich right wing vultures like the Koch brothers, the crowds at these right wing events have grown smaller and smaller, until we've reached the point where, in the last two marches, months of planning could not produce a crowd larger than 130 or so.
Face it, Anonymous- the mighty movement you think you belong to is a mirage financed by the Koch brothers.
And sorry, Joseph, I know what you mean, but the Kochs have to be a lot more miserable than this to evoke my pity.
I simply do not find reliable indication that the protests you attended had a million people, either in an individual rally or in aggregate. Those that say “up to X” number are already suspect, for that is a sales trick. Half a dozen is up to a million. The phrasing renders the number meaningless.
It is reoccurring observation of mine that people tend to use numbers as adjectives or points of exclamation with little or no connection to the actual reality of what those numbers entail, hence my toilets rant.
Largest individual rally is in the high tens of thousands, according to reliable estimates, which is NOT AT ALL impressive in a country with the population of the United States, particularly given the saturation coverage, the funding, the ample time to prepare and agitate, or the depth of urgency (my polite way of saying ‘frothing idiocy’) with which Tea Party rhetoric is expressed.
I go to football matches with more attendees than that on a weekly basis.
You may be sincere. You may honestly believe the movement is what you say it is. But by all reliable numbers, it is a miserable failure given its resources. A very bad bet. One of the worst performing businesses in America.
I own a river bridge in the Great Victoria Desert if you would like to buy it from me. One careful owner, never been crossed.