There is a through-the-looking glass element to some of the criticism. The Daily Caller reported that based on photographs, the Occupy forces were almost exclusively white (numerous studies and polls have shown the Tea Party, too, has proportionately few members of minority groups).

The Tea Party, too, was vague about its frustrations in its early days, or contradictory, as in the sign at one rally that was cited as evidence that the Tea Party itself was uneducated and uninformed: “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.”

At Tea Party protests you could find the kind of one-off cranks that conservatives have found at Occupy rallies — Tea Party organizers would explain them as fringe-y interlopers. (Those Obama-as-Hitler posters, they noted, were the work of Lyndon LaRouche supporters, not Tea Party activists.)…

Conservatives are trying to define the Occupy protesters before the protesters define themselves.

Ed Morrissey, writing in The Week, insisted that the Occupy movement wants “seizures and redistributions, which necessarily means more bureaucracies, higher spending, and many more opportunities for collusion between authorities and moneyed interests in one way or another.”