Obama speaks out on Occupy Wall Street; you’ll never guess how he views the movement

posted at 3:32 pm on October 6, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Obama ]   

Remember when Barack Obama said that the Tea Party “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel?” Oh, wait. That wasn’t the Tea Party he said that about. It was Occupy Wall Street, the group that liberal writer Michael Scherer described as “marginal, rag-tag, ill-defined and without focus.”

Based on the group’s latest shenanigans, Scherer could have added violent to his list of descriptors. Last night members of New York’s finest clashed with demonstrators for the second time, but this time things really got ugly. The New York Post reports that

skirmishes broke out along Broadway, with arrests at Liberty, Cedar, Wall and Ann streets.

In most cases, protesters tried to jump barricades, drawing sharp police responses.

The biggest clash happened as more than 150 marchers demanded access to Wall Street from Broadway.

About 25 of them tried to push through, as officers used clubs and Mace to move them back. One cop in a white shirt, signaling he’s a supervisor, was caught on camera wildly swinging his baton in the battle, which led to at least six arrests.

Shades of the Tea Party, no? No. Jim Treacher at The Daily Caller asks rhetorically, “Who’s more likely to get arrested, a Tea Partier or a Wall Street Occupier?” but only the most abject liar on the left could profess not to know the lone truthful answer to that question.

In addition to their proclivity toward violence, the OWSers still seem to be a group in search of a message. But neither that nor their angry-mob mentality has stopped the president from expressing his admiration for them.

At his press conference today, Obama explained somewhat circularly:

We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression—huge collateral damage throughout the country, all across main street. And yet, you are still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us in the situation in the first place. I think people are frustrated.

Come again? “Some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly” are now“trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us in the situation in the first place”? I don’t think people who read those words will be as frustrated as they are confused.

Extracting the message that he was aiming for (and repeats more lucidly later on in his remarks—that Americans are angry “over abusive practices by the financial sector”), one gets the clear sense that Obama somehow sees his own abusive practices as not deserving of the same the angry response.

They’ve been receiving that response from the Tea Party all along, but Obama isn’t nearly so sympathetic to that group of dissenters. In fact, he has taken shots at them for doing essentially what he praises OWS for doing.

The president should really keep his distance from the Wall Street protesters. Once they figure out what—and whom—they’re really mad at, he may want to make sure he’s nowhere in sight.

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