David Carr has a wickedly funny evisceration of the London protests over the Bush/Blair summit over at Libertarian Samizdata. He even took some pictures that shows just how nutty these people are. A sample:
At least there was the customary hotch-potch of causes and grievances to be relied upon. Socialist Workers, Young Socialist Workers, Old Socialist Workers, Retired Socialist Workers, Communist Revolutionaries, Trade Unionists, Enviro-mentalists, Gay Rights, Animal Rights, Anarchist Rights, a whole slew of ageing CND veterans, a mere smattering of Islamic banners and one po-faced old duffer demanding ‘Subsidies For The Arts Now!’. No, this was pretty much a whitebread event. Or, more accurately, a redbread event. It was if the Guardian has disgorged the contents of its subscription database onto the streets of London.
It gets better from there. The London protests are another set of mindless sloganeering made by people whose worldview is shaped by a steady diet of Chomskyite drivel and haven’t read a single paper without the terms “Workers” or “Socialist” in the title. It’s hard to paint yourself as some expert on world affairs when you have to dress up like a clown to be heard.
I guess it stands to reason that most protests are gonna be conducted by those who feel disenfranchised by the system of, by and for the benefit of the powerful, and these groups usually consist of people defending liberal causes. On the other hand, angry protesters denouncing the American President and British Prime Minister’s role in manufacturing a war that killed thousands and threw world relations into a tailspin seems downright sane compared to the few things that motivate shirt-and-tie wearing suburban conservatives to exit their gated community and turn into revolutionaries for a day.
Remember just a couple months ago, a time when hundreds were losing their lives needlessly in Iraq and thousands of Americans were joining the ranks of the unemployed each month, the issue that managed to anger conservatives was the removal of a Ten Commandments statue illegally displayed in an Alabama courthouse. Liberal protestors get worked up about fraudulent wars and trade agreements erasing their jobs at dizzying speed, while conservative protestors drive hundreds of miles to stand on the steps of a Montgomery courthouse and scream “PUT THE TEN COMMANDMENTS BACK!!!!” I think I’d be more comfortable in the presence of the former group than the latter.
And not to be outdone, a certain Miami-Dade County courtroom in mid-November of 2000 comes to mind as another moment which drove hundreds of yuppies, specifically Tom DeLay’s stooges, into forming a mob intent on obstructing a legally-mandatory recount of votes.
You’ve convinced me. These protestors are a sick bunch….and they MUST be stopped.
I guess it stands to reason that most protests are gonna be conducted by those who feel disenfranchised by the system
Hippies? Come on, Mark. Look at those crowds. They are hippies. Old and young.
Note that conservative protestors don’t feel the need to use giant puppets, burn things, or loot businesses to get their point across.
Note also that most of the leftist protestors are hardly blue collar workers, they’re privileged members of the protest class who have time to be wildly indignant about nearly everything. The people these protests would effect are the people who want more free trade. While the protestors get to go back to their comfortable university dorms, those farmers have to scratch out a living without the benefits of the world’s largest market to sell to.
The protest class is based on ignorance and hypocrisy, and should be treated as such.
Through mob rule, conservative protestors managed to put the brakes on a legally-mandatory recount of votes in Miami-Dade County in November 2000. I would say that’s at least as threatening as liberal protestors managing to get a trade summit at Cancun delayed.
What really boggles my mind is how organized protests, particularly in the case of the at least modestly successful coup d’etat in Miami-Dade County three years ago, is consistent with the dogma of rugged individualism embraced by the right. For that matter, why do we even need an organized military? Shouldn’t motivated individuals be able to take national defense upon themselves without a state-sponsored organization of troops that requires forced extraction of other people’s money to sustain? It’s time you conservatives start trusting individuals more and quit relying on government to tell people how to live their lives!
More bullshit.
The Miami-Dade Canvassing Board voted to stop the manual recount on November 23, 2000 because they could not complete it within the time proscribed by Florida law. The Florida Supreme Court refused to intervene and denied a writ of mandamus in the case.
Furthermore, on December 4, 2000, Judge Sanders Sauls decided that the 14,000 “undervotes” would not need to be counted undersection 102.168 of Florida Statutes. As he stated:
The SCOTUS agreed with the judge in Bush v. Gore. Furthermore, when the Miami Herald and the Associated Press recounted those votes in 2001 they found that they would not have changed the results of the 2000 election. Had Gore gotten his way and their been a fair and accurate revote in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment and Florida law, George W. Bush would still have won.
Of course, when have little things like the facts or the law gotten in the way of the Donk jihad against common sense?
I have no interest in regurgitating the tired self-interested justifications of both sides in Bush versus Gore. Your entire speel attempts to draw a non-existent parallel between two events. Any rulings about the legality of the recounts, particularly the one you mentioned, happened AFTER the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board was doing their job in accordance to federal law.
Beyond that, the Canvassing Board was terrorized into submission by some of the best-dressed legbreakers on record. There is nothing to indicate that their motivation in “voting to stop the recount” was based on anything but self-preservation. To say that the Board “voted to stop the manual recount” is tantamount to saying the shopkeeper “graciously accepted” giving kickbacks to the mob thugs knocking on his door after they made him “a deal he couldn’t refuse.”
Translation: I’m not interested in things like facts or the law. I’d rather engage in partisan masturbation.
BTW, accusing someone of a federal crime is considered libel.