"Big Lethargy" on Wall Street
Mark Steyn on the Occupy Wall Street crowd:
They’re the most pampered, blinkered, narcissistic, useless generation in the history of Western civilization. And if they got their way, we would be living in the ruins of a once-glorious civilization. Now I have no quarrels with attacking Wall Street. I do it in my book. I think you can make the case that the American banking system is perhaps the most inept and dysfunctional in the G-7, for example. But these people have no solutions to that. These are people who want to create a society that actually obliges them to do nothing. They want to live a Western lifestyle without doing the work necessary to maintain that lifestyle. And if they were to get their way, we’re all done for. And to listen to the president of the United States, the supposed leader of the supposed free world pandering to them, kissing up to them, saying that he understands their frustrations because he’s frustrated, too, he should be ashamed of himself. Why doesn’t he go there and join them sniffing the arugula around the clock or whatever they’re doing down there.
But Mark, how do you really feel?
You’ve got union workers making common cause with a lot of pampered, spoiled, little white-bread nincompoops who have no idea of the particular blessings and the unique moment in history that they’ve been privileged to grow up in. And you’ve got union thugs and union bully boys making union infrastructure resources available to them all in the cause of statism. And there’s a kind of, I think there’s a kind of tragedy about this alliance. When they’re standing there in Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, protesting the immense wealth generated in Lower Manhattan, when they look at those towering skyscrapers, who do they think built those skyscrapers? They don't know or care.
Big labor is getting into bed with big lethargy, which is what those guys, those useless guys listening to their hair grow, and smoking the arugula. That’s what they represent – big lethargy and big labor yoking forces to condemn America to more of what’s killing it, which is this brutal, suffocating statism. I’ve never seen…I mean, I find it impossible to express my contempt for this Occupy Wall Street now, because you now have basically the privileged thugs of statism, like public sector unions, making alliance with so-called anarchists so moronic, so moronized by our education system, that they’re anarchists for big government. I’ve never heard anything more stupid in my life. Read the rest or listen here.
Nancy Pelosi tries to spin the OWSers as young idealists (guess she missed this video):
God bless them for their spontaneity. It's independent, it's young, it's spontaneous, and it's focused. And it's going to be effective."
"The message of the protesters is a message for the establishment everyplace. No longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street."Like Nancy Pelosi is not part of the establishment! And who got us into this mess, again?
Everyone knows the protest is neither spontaneous nor focused.
Andrea Peyser: Please, just get to the point of this, people:
This revolution has no focus. But it does have a class system.
On one end of Zuccotti Park, where the unorganized, unhinged Occupy Wall Street demonstration is entering its third week, sit the elite. They’re young, overwhelmingly white, college-age kids banging Mac laptops, and yelling into iPhones before bedding down in Brooklyn.
On the other end, mercifully separated by a mountain of tarpaulins, sleeping bags and human refuse I would not touch with a Hazmat suit, sleep the Smelly Ones. Standing downwind of this human biohazard isn’t pretty.
We’re here at the protest epicenter, the planetary point where bitchery meets bellyaching. And it makes no kind of cosmic sense.Bill Zeiser: Live from Wall Street:
As a patriotic American, the first thing I noticed was that many of the thousands of protesters held signs that were either printed by socialist organizations, or called for socialist revolution. [. . .]
My second observation was that the protesters have a distinct spirit of defeatism and unwillingness to do anything for themselves. "Jail Sallie Mae. End all Student Debt," said one sign. "**** your unpaid internship," said another. "You want demands? We want a future," was scrawled on a piece of cardboard playing off of the public perception that the protesters have no organized slate of goals. "Where is OUR bailout?" "Shelters are not family friendly!" "Tax the Rich!" The hits kept on coming.And so on. It's all very discouraging. But the deadbeat OWSers aren't the whole story on this generation. Some kids still plan to become engineers, nurses, and auto mechanics. They're willing to work hard and don't expect, or even want, something for nothing. That's not a message they can take to the street -- they've got jobs and classes to attend. They may never meet Susan Sarandon or Michael Moore or be the object of Nancy Pelosi's praise, but they can live with that.
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