Tonight (October 14, 2011), on the "O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly said that there is no connection of Obama to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Well, that's not exactly right.
O'Reilly, Fox News' top-rated, conservative-leaning host and commentator, responded to a viewer's message which seemed to suggest that Obama had a hand in starting the OWS protests. O'Reilly said (paraphrasing) he has not seen anything to connect Obama to the protests. If there were something to connect the president to OWS, the host added, that would be an incredible story.
O'Reilly is correct on both counts: there is no evidence showing Obama is involved with the protests, and if there were, it would make for a stunning story. But there's more to look at. Other than some complimentary references such as those Obama has already made to the protesters, there may never be a connection from Obama to the cult-like, repetitious, finger-swirling OWS crowds. The Fox News host -- and many others, too -- are missing a connection because they are looking for the links from the wrong side. While a direct connection from Obama to Occupy Wall Street (Et Al) is not evident, overtures are there. The connection is not from the White House to the activists, though. It is from the opposite direction, from activists to the ideas that swirl around at the bottom of the dirty sink filled with Obama's useful-idiot-pandering, Marxism-ridden, class warfare toned rhetoric.
The message O'Reilly was reacting to was likely inspired by, in part, claims from those opposed to Obama and/or the protesters, that the "Occupy" protesters are involved, knowingly or not, in a diversion by the Left to take attention off of the economic failures of the Obama Administration and similar-thinking leaders. The person who wrote the Factor just went a little too far, and O'Reilly was not going to parse it, but answered the message directly.
The park-squatting protesters who, at times, evoke blatantly anti-capitalist views, are the far side of what Obama seems to evoke, however dishonestly or veiled he is about it. Their anarchist-seeming chatter can make the anti-success, anti-rich, anti-business rhetoric of the vote-pandering White House seem more in the center of political discourse than it is. So the OWS movement is to Obama's advantage, possibly benefiting him among the most pliable of the public's eyes and ears.
The park-squatting protesters who, at times, evoke blatantly anti-capitalist views, are the far side of what Obama seems to evoke, however dishonestly or veiled he is about it. Their anarchist-seeming chatter can make the anti-success, anti-rich, anti-business rhetoric of the vote-pandering White House seem more in the center of political discourse than it is. So the OWS movement is to Obama's advantage, possibly benefiting him among the most pliable of the public's eyes and ears.
Media organizations from (the commonly liberal) Reuters -- as I saw and noted here -- to (the commonly thrashing liberals) Andrew Breitbart sites have made connections from the movement to Obama. O'Reilly is correct, but he has not seen the tweets, Facebook rants, and overt allegiance of "OWS" joiners to the Obama agenda.
Posted via email from Like, Totally Political Dude! - posterous
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