Shamelessly ripped from The Corner
It’s a little reactionary, but this drives me nuts. NRO is full of nice, brilliant people. Can one of you kids please tell me how a bunch of hippie-wanna-be, rubbing-the-numbers-off-Daddy’s-AMEX, will-pass-school-because-they-spout-the-same-bile-as-their-professors protestors will tell a single mother who arrives to work 1/2 a day late and gets docked for four hours pay because the bus route she rides is clogged by idiots and cretins taking the occasional bong-hit- how do any of these silly protests make any sense?
There is a constitutional right to protest, although not explicit. The explicit rights regard speech and assembly. There is not a right to loiter, harass, or disrupt commerce. There is not a right to trespass. There are actually laws agaist those actions. I say arrest the leaders of these protests, and bill them and their organizations for the police protection that they inspire. I know for a fact (as a consultant to a local city government) that even the KKK pays for their police protection when they hold one of their vile ‘rallys’, in which- I am proud to say- the last had four times as many counter-protesters as the rally itself.
To me, as the taxes paid on commerce help support the military and some of their ‘targets’ are governmental, direct impedence of entry or egress is an act of terrorism at most, sabotage at median, and harrasment at the least. Raise my taxes a 10-spot a year to print more citation books.
Since when did a 25-year-old idiot-for-hire for ANSWER, or some other crackpot organization care more about saving a brutal tyrant whos own people want him gone, than they do for a single parent that needs to get to that second job after working ‘graveyard’ to feed and shelter their kids in Bed-Sty or Haight-Asbury? The hypocrisy and lack of that ellusive ‘grasp’ is just damn near startling.
Yep, made that argument before. But I’m more in favor of “direct action.” That is, shooting the damn, dirty hippies before they can disrupt a fine Thursday in the Big Apple. But, howabout this for the downlow on our current crop of protestors?
Reader Heather Wilhelm writes:
just got to my office after visiting 50th and 5th. My thoughts: This protest was straight out of Monty Python….Half of the people at the protest a) hadn’t shaved in weeks b) didn’t seem to know where they were. Despite the helicopters and what seemed about half of the NYPD force, I don’t think there could have been more than 200 people there. My personal highlight: As I was giving a shout-out of support of the NYPD, an older, grizzled man grabbed my arm in a panic. “Your bag, man,” he said, pointing at my bright blue shoulder satchel. “It’s CURSED.” He looked geniunely terrified and backed away. “I know these things, man, I can see it in that blue, man?” And then he went back to shouting “No war!” at the cops. If this is the fifth column, we’re in good shape.
Whoa, maybe we ought to hand out some heavy drugs. Just think, position large hookahs in the backs of paddy wagons and play Mr. Softie music while driving slowly alongside the protests. Lure them in man, it’d be just like the pied piper and shit.