The Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

Or, "The goose having been sauced, bring on the gander."


As Jon Stewart pointed out on a recent episode of The Daily Show, media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has officially gone from "blackout" to "circus" (those, oddly enough, being the only two settings on the dial). But Occupy Wall Street somehow doesn't seem to be getting the same media love as the Tea Party. Why should that be?

By Linda Felaco



Despite claims of being a grassroots, populist type movement (rather than the right-wing phenomenon they truly are), Tea Partiers are disavowing the Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the Wall Street demonstrators "un-American" and contrasting their "lawbreaking" with the alleged scrupulous legality of the Tea Party protest methods. But as Stewart points out, the infractions committed by the Wall Street demonstrators have been misdemeanors, while the original Boston Tea Party was a felony:

The tea party namesake was the most celebrated act of theft and vandalism of private property in our nation's history, and you can't stomach a little park camping?

Tea Partiers also claim to have a more coherent message than the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, but I've seen no evidence of that, have you? Take a look at this Tea Party slogan generator and see if you can find any qualitative difference between these and actual Tea Party rants. Here's a sample:

The exact phrase separation of Church and State came out of Adolph Hitler's mouth, that's where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State, ask them why they're Nazis.

Occupy Washington, D.C. Photos from
the Occupy Providence Facebook page.

Meanwhile, John McIntyre blogged in response to a reader who wanted to know why the Baltimore Sun hadn't been covering the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations:

I marveled at the tea party, organizing on the Internet, which was created and made available free to all by the government,* and traveling on roads and streets built by the government, would appear to voice a belief that we cannot trust our elected government but should instead trust corporations.

The same thing mystified me during the debate over President Obama’s health care plan. Are there people who feel affection for their insurance companies, who admire and respect the faceless functionaries who increase their premiums every year and then, when illness strikes, deny coverage? When people complained that the Obama plan would subject us to choking paperwork and arbitrary decisions made by unaccountable officials, I wondered what the bumf** they thought we have now.

*D’you think that it IBM or Apple had developed the Internet, it would be free for you to use?

**Bumf is a lovely bit of British slang for official forms and paperwork. It is a shortened form of bumfodder, that is, toilet paper.

So really, in the end, it all comes down to the old left-right divide. Right-wingers can repeat till their dying breath the canard that the media is "leftist," but it will never change the fact that the media of this country consists of major corporations with the usual (right-wing) interests of any large corporation, and the punditocracy as a general rule knows which side its bread is buttered on.