And now, a bunch of people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Posted by: Ian – Sep 25, 2009

I don't protest. I have in the past, but I quickly realized that I personally accomplish very little by yelling at buildings. With that said, I've always found it fascinating that it seems as if a large portion of people who go to protests know very little about the what the protest is supposed to be regarding, or even the topics they're pushing.

All of the protests I've been to were organized by the left. I cringed in 2004, watching the RNC protests, as I realized that the waves upon waves of protesters were playing into Carl Rove's hands. I'm no fan of Rove- despise him, in fact- but you can't knock hustle. He held his convention in NYC to lure the protesters, and it worked. He wanted the furthest left- black block anarchists, hippies, queers and the like- out in the streets, and most importantly, on television, so that the media could portray them as batshit crazy. Look, here, god-fearing christian Americans! This is the left wing. Despite the fact that the majority of protesters thought Kerry was a big-government corporate schmuck (and I wouldn't deny at least a partial truth to that statement), Rove was able to portray them as representative of the left, and it worked. The RNC protests did more to scare Middle America than it did to raise opposition to Dubyah.

Now the tables have turned. It's time for the right wing's total nutjobs to take to the streets! Not to imply that all of the RNC protesters (or anti-war protesters) were hardline ideologues, in fact, I believe that the opposite could be true. However, the cameras did their job. I don't know if the majority of the 9/12 protesters are as ignorant as the ones captured on camera here, of course. But I can only hope that after the mass demonstrations of the past seemed to do more to motivate their opposition than to rally their base, that the same can be true here. I hope that these blundering, ill-informed idiots motivate our nation's progressives to new levels of involvement and action. Time will tell, of course.