The Conservative Soldier

The Occupy movement took an alarming turn last week. As it trends toward terrorism, protestors were raging perilously close to their No. 1 fan, the President of the United States, as a union-choreographed occupation of Washington targeted the Capitol and nearby K Street.

An ocean away authorities in Germany announced that they discovered a letter bomb addressed to Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann that made it to the mailroom of the bank’s Frankfurt headquarters. The finding triggered an immediate security alert for banks in New York, including Deutsche Bank and its Wall Street address. Senior executives undoubtedly will find themselves living in an ever more protected bubble.

Even if the Frankfurt letter is not proven to have direct ties to the Occupiers, it is obviously an act intended to signal a likeminded hatred of the financial sector, which is the core target of Occupy Wall Street and its network of urban encampments.

Across the U.S., the Occupy mobs continue to proliferate and are more emboldened than ever despite losing ground to law enforcement efforts to disperse them. The Occupy San Francisco camp was cleared out, resulting in 70 arrests, two on assault charges after a police officer was struck by a folding chair. In New Orleans and Boston, police took similar action and forcibly cleared encampments before dawn.

The San Francisco mobs told reporters they would disrupt traffic in retaliation for their displacement from their filthy tent village. Traffic disruption also was the focus of protests along K Street. The Washington Post reports thusly:

The demonstrators were among those who had been bused in from cities across the country to join the Occupiers as part of a week-long protest called “Take Back the Capitol,” sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, one of the biggest labor unions in the country.

With each passing week, the organic nature of the Occupy protests yield to well funded, orchestrated demonstrations and occupations. In Brooklyn, N.Y., a group led a homeless family on a “march” to a vacated home that is in foreclosure. The home’s front door was mysteriously “unlocked” and occupied by the family and anti-foreclosure protestors.

Clearly, this was a case of trespassing and property invasion. The refusal of the President to denounce the Occupy movement’s law breaking, street violence and class warfare rhetoric means that Barack Obama would rather court potential voters than protect the well being of the citizenry at large. By turning his back on the rule of law, Obama is charting the most reckless course of his, or any, presidency.

When the first bomb is detonated on Wall Street, when the first bank executive is murdered, when local law enforcement can no longer contain the surges of rage in our cities, only one man will be responsible for a new era of domestic terrorism in America.

That man is the 44th President of the United States. It is unclear if he will regret the consequences of his silence, or silently rejoice.

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane over the weekend smugly opined that the Democrats’ push to extend the so-called payroll tax cut for the middle class is a politically smart strategy, economic consequences notwithstanding. Translation: When Washington is handing out free money the people are happy; when it is “taking it away” from outstretched hands the people are unhappy.

This is what it all boils down to in 2011. We can ask all day long, rhetorically, “Are we Greece?” The presumption is that the question should beg introspection as to where the United States might be headed. But usually the posing of the question carries the caveat that such a possibility is, of course, preposterous.

The relevant question, sadly, is, “When did we become Greece?” That is the answer that must be confronted. Lane, appearing on Fox News Sunday, did not seem capable of grasping that a U.S. President, in this case the 44th, Barack Obama, would for a moment weigh political survival against fiscal adulthood. Survival, what else?

Politicians always err on the side of survival, but America’s growing gravy train culture is raising the stakes. The union empowered classes have become defiant about demanding their government goodies. Like their European counterparts, they could care less about the consequences.

Winston Churchill famously quipped that “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing — until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.” If he could check in on us today, Sir Winston would be unable to draw the same conclusion.

Do the Occupying parasites care about “doing the right thing”? Do the unions that handcuff iconic brands such as bankrupt American Airlines consider the ramifications of protecting their “entitlements” even if it means sacrificing jobs down the road? On both counts, they do not. They say we owe them, so pay up. Doing the right thing, curbing spending and recalibrating entitlements is equally foreign to the raging masses in Ohio, Wisconsin and Washington state, who gladly imperil the economic viability of their communities, indeed of future generations, because they believe that a government subsidized life from cradle to grave is their birthright.

The socialist Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin looked incredulously into the cameras last Sunday when his fellow senator, Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, refused to support an extension of the middle-class payroll tax cut — a “cut” that hastens the insolvency of Social Security. Durbin just can’t understand why we as a people would not want to sustain a payroll tax cut that depletes the Social Security trust fund. Simply impose another tax obligation on “the wealthiest Americans”, Durbin advises.

It never occurs to the Durbins and Lanes that there are still Americans who would rather see the tax burden lifted from job creators (business owners), who would embrace a chance to maximize their earnings through incentive-based bonuses, or old-fashioned overtime hours, rather than wait by the mailbox for a $1,000 pay roll tax refund check.

The Republican presidential candidate who can expose the peril of feeding the entitlement class as it chugs along aboard the gravy train toward European collapse is the one who will occupy the Oval Office as of Jan. 20, 2013.

By then we will have exhausted all other possibilities.

Where does it end? When does the chronic unrest, or whatever it is, simply become tedious, even among restless? The dangerous presumption is that this suddenly evaporates, that the nation’s Occupiers will soon long for a cozy couch, and their reality TV shows, and one of mom’s signature “home cooked meals” (picked up ready-to-eat at Whole Foods).

But maybe it doesn’t go away. Maybe, as they say on Wall Street, it is systemic. The Occupy Everything devotees harbor deeply entrenched contempt for American culture and values. Their sense of entitlement runs deep, too.

How do I know? I was with them last Friday night in Washington, D.C.  On my way from a parking lot to the D.C. Convention Center, I stood at an intersection, waiting for a traffic signal. My daughter, a high school freshman who had flown in with me that afternoon, was at my side.

Up the block we could see a mass of humanity with an enormous inflatable “thing” hovering above it, partially illuminated by a street lamp. It was after dark; a windy, chilly night lay ahead.

As we stood at the corner near Mt. Vernon Park, a handful of young people rushed up, anxious to cross the street. Their skin was tattooed. Body piercings were evident. One, a male about 5-10, wore a bandana over his face, concealing everything but forehead and eyes. He could have been any street thug in any city, in any country in the world. They sprinted away to join a throng that D.C. police later estimated would swell to 500-plus.

Although we were never in any actual danger - a fate others inside the convention hall would confront a few hours later - there was an uneasy feeling in the air, a feeling that these streets were not a place for a man in a business suit, or a teen-aged girl in a skirt and heels, dressed for a Ronald Reagan Tribute dinner hosted by a pro-values organization called Americans for Prosperity.

There was no mystery about how these angry protestors found their way to the convention center. They were sent. Occupy DC, like Occupy Wall Street, and all the others, is an orchestrated occupation. On this night, the target was not so much the quest for prosperity but the underwriters of the event inside, the Koch brothers, who are financial backers of Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party friendly movement comprised of state chapters that pre-date the Tea Party awakening of 2009.

Inside the convention center ballroom, the evening’s first keynote speaker, Judge Andrew Napolitano, was interrupted 30 seconds into his remarks by Occupy infiltrators who were removed swiftly by security personnel, properly anticipating that something would happen. Later, another infiltrator in a dark suit and narrow necktie was marched out by law enforcement as he shouted and tried to squirm from their grasp.

As the program attended by about 2,000 guests unfolded inside, the Occupy DC mob encircled the convention center, filling sidewalks and streets, positioned and ready to harass attendees when the evening’s activities concluded.

What the occupiers really wanted was a piece of the Koch brothers, Charles and David, who own a vast empire of consumer goods companies and oil refineries, and are known to have contributed millions to libertarian, conservative and anti-Obama causes. Lost in all the rage was any acknowledgement that Koch Industries - Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific paper and Stainmaster carpets et al - employ thousands of Americans who are proud of the quality products they produce. They might even hire some of the protestors if they’d take the time to research job openings and submit a resume.

While a few attendees were later roughed up trying to leave - we were directed to a back exit and took a detour back to our car to avoid the fray - including a 78-year-old woman knocked to the concrete, David Koch walked out and did not draw so much as a hiss.

According to a Huffington Post dispatch:

David Koch, the (American) Spectator reports, walked out of the dinner and passed unrecognized right through the Occupy DC demonstration targeting him and his brother Charles.

“It was only after Koch was gone that my friend told the Occupiers that they’d just missed the villain whose presence at the Convention Center had inspired all the chaos,” Robert Stacy McCain wrote in the Spectator.

As with any assemblage of lowlifes, they might succeed in intimidating but rarely will blow anybody away with widespread demonstrations of intellect. David Koch correctly assumed he would stride anonymously through the denim-clad masses unscathed because they were looking for a fat guy with a cigar and he is quite the opposite.

But this amusing anecdote aside, the occupiers blight our nation. Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com chronicles more than 170 violent or criminal acts that have been ignored by the Obama-compliant media. In fact, at least 36 hours lapsed before the D.C.-area media picked up on the convention center disturbances, and another 24, at least, passed before the national media noticed.

Breitbart, the czar of investigative digital journalism, was a speaker at the D.C. event the next morning. While the protestors slept off their night of rage, the ballroom was filled again by 9:30 a.m., with Breitbart the lead off man. He offered a sober warning.

He dismissed the occupiers as “freaks” who are envious of the Tea Party’s national profile. But he warned that their agenda is nonetheless a threat because of its ties to George Soros, Van Jones, pro-Jihadi and international communist organizations.

“The real rioting is still to come,” Breitbart said. “We’re in the midst of an electronic civil war.”

Walking away from the D.C. Convention Center late last Friday night it did feel like a war zone. There were random protestors hanging around street corners. Police cars were parked in cross walks.

President Reagan’s shining city on a hill is under siege. But this is not a time to grow timid. This a moment that calls for walking into the fray like David Koch, chins and spirits up.