Two questions here. One: Is the ad fair? Two: Does that matter?

Here’s the answer to the first question.

TDB: I’m curious: Is there something that is keeping you away from this movement? Is there a reason why you haven’t embraced it?

EW: Look, everybody has to follow the law. That’s the starting point. I’ve been fighting this fight for years and years now. As I see it, this is about two central points: one, this is about the lack of accountability. That Wall Street has not been held accountable for how they broke the economy. The second is a values question, a fundamental fairness around the way that markets have been distorted and families have been hurt. I’m still fighting that fight. I’m just fighting it from this angle. I’m fighting it from … I want to fight it from the floor of the United States Senate. I think that is a place to make this difference.

To answer the second question, join me in a stroll down memory lane by watching the second clip below. Old-school HA readers have seen it before; the DNC rolled it out in August 2009, when tea partiers angry over ObamaCare started showing up to Democrats’ town halls to yell at them. At the first whiff of popular discontent on the right, Obama’s brain trust went full demagogue about “angry mobs.” Fast forward two years and you have leftist protesters fighting with cops, mass arrests, “sexual assault, regular assault, theft, drug dealing” happening at protest campsites, ongoing health hazards in tent cities due to human waste and occasional rat infestations, missing funds, and of course the usual smorgasbord of radical rhetoric from the fringier elements, be they commies, kooks, and/or anti-semites. And yet, miraculously, this not-angry non-mob is the darling of the Democratic Party. Frankly, the most amazing thing about the Massachusetts GOP ad is how easy it is on Warren, focusing mostly on revolutionary boilerplate from OWSers rather than their ominous extracurriculars. So let me ask you again, having now reminded you of what consummate frauds the Democrats are when it comes to civility by protesters. Even granting that the ad is unfair to Warren, does it matter?

Incidentally, since we’re on the topic of fairness, here’s my favorite “Occupy”-related story of the day:

A Virginia tea party group is demanding a refund of about $8,000 from the city of Richmond, claiming it was unfairly charged for rallies while Occupy protesters have used the same space for several weeks for free…

Richmond Tea Party spokeswoman Colleen Owens says it’s not fair that her group had to pay fees for permits, portable toilets, police and emergency personnel. The group also had to purchase a $1 million insurance policy.

And so it came to be that the “angry mob” lost eight grand by playing by the rules while America’s Sweethearts get to build their own communes on public land with no interference from the police, even with crime happening right in front of them. Good times. I ask this in all seriousness: Has there been any more egregious double standard towards the right over the last five years than the commentariat’s treatment of OWS versus the tea party? They spent late 2009 and the entirety of 2010 treating conservative protests as a form of domestic terrorism, punctuated by the horrible right-wing attack on Gabby Giffords that wasn’t a right-wing attack at all. And now suddenly their own side is in the streets and behaving vastly worse, yet somehow they’re the last, best hope of the middle class. See Treacher’s post here for just one example of what I mean. Honestly — any worse double standard?

Here’s the Warren ad and the DNC ad. I’m including a third vid, via Breitbart TV, of Lee Stranahan’s look at just how “non-violent” the Oakland protesters were the other night. Mother Jones, to its credit, admitted the truth about that today despite its sympathies for OWS’s cause. Too bad conservatives like Joe Scarborough couldn’t.