Occupy

From the start, I said that the best thing about the Occupy movement was that at least they were yelling at the right buildings. I think, at the start, some of the Tea Party people felt the same way, but they were so easily and quickly assimilated into conventional right-wing politics that their most lasting contribution has been to push the Republican party so far out into the fringes that they might as well televise their convention this summer on River Monsters. This is because, from the start, they yelled at the wrong buildings. They yelled at the Congress and at the state legislatures, as though they were anything more than the simple vehicles through which the real work of stealing the country got done. For all their shortcomings, and despite their appearances on the campaign trail, the Occupy people have resisted assimilation into the Democratic party, and they have concentrated as thoroughly as they can on the people who did the actual thieving. This may well be the movement's undoing as a "conventional" political force, but there is more to do about getting this country back on the right track, I think, than re-electing Barack Obama or making sure Bob Kerrey — gawd! — manages to "hold" the Senate seat currently occupied to wretched effect by Ben Nelson, a thoroughgoing horse's ass who's no more an actual Democrat than he is a sword swallower. The Right has abandoned the job of reconstructing our failed state. It's current plan, energized by the assimilated Tea Party, is to wreck government's ever tepid response to the gargantuan crimes of the last decade.

If the Occupy people want to march, I say let them march. If they resist conventional politics, that may be because conventional politics are worth resisting. What I do know is that, if i weren't for the people in the streets last autumn, the Obama people would be running a very different campaign and Willard Romney wouldn't look half as ridiculous as he does.

  Charlie Pierce