Bold Independent Thinkers

Today there was another letter in the local paper asking rhetorically why the Occupy Wall Street protesters don't occupy Washington DC? I've seen this trope quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, by people who think they've really caught those hippies in their own hypocrisy. Another popular trope the letter-writer used was "stop whining and vote!" Why yes, we found out how well that worked in 2008! To his credit, the letter-writer didn't include the "take a bath, you dirty hippies!" trope, but maybe that was edited out for reasons of length.

Funny thing, though. There is already an Occupy DC. It's no more acceptable to clear-headed, public-spirited citizens than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Oakland or any of the other sites, though FOX News is trying by reverse psychology to make it look bad. (I liked this piece at The Week, which called a 2 percent drop in support for OWS as "plummeting." True, the same poll showed a 9-point jump in opposition, but the story is obviously more complicated than the headline, though you wouldn't know it from the piece itself, which ignores the corporate media's ongoing antipathy to the movement.)

Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the "go occupy DC!" line is a talking point that these people were handed by someone else; but it does indicate that their hostility to OWS is motivated by something other than reason or fact.