Sometime soon we'll have to leave the free-baggers behind and move on to the important business of putting business of moving Health Care, Energy, Education and other important legislation forward.
Until then I'd like to share with you some fun we had today in front of the White House.
While you've no doubt read dozens of first hand reports from yesterday's astroturf demos, before we move on to the big legislative battles ahead I thought it would be instructive to get one more taste of the unfocused anger driven "opposition" we may encounter as we move the progressive agenda forward in the next 2 years.
Here is a little taste of what 8 little old Billionaires had to deal with in the rain in front of the White House yesterday afternoon ... here ... here ... here ... and here.
There was a lot of yelling (parasite, scum, librul, commie, socialist, fascist) on the the part of the angry free-baggers, but there was also a bit of good behavior that should be noted on the part of a small fraction (1-2%) of the demonstrators too. The "nice" and "rational" folks appeared to fall into one of two categories. They were either in an obvious position of power vis a vis the rally (e.g. organizers) or came from a socio-economic class where lower capital gains taxes, a generally more regressive tax system and a slimmer set of government programs might make sense from a very narrowly defined (me, me, me, me) definition of good.
The vast majority of attendees were very pissed off (had plenty of people whisper in my ear as I walked through the crowd things like "I'm gonna fuck you up", "Liberal traitor", "Parasite", etc.) and seemed not too too far away from wanting me and my kind (Jew? intellectual? Liberal?) rounded up and sent to prison camps or worse.
I'm not suggesting that we take these folks too seriously, but we certainly ignore their anger at our peril. The opportunity I see here is political. The pure anger and venom that oozes from much of the free-bagger movement can be used as a WEDGE to drive independents and thinking republicans away from the R party.
What we do (as Billionaires) is use humor and irony to attract (okay steal) media and project a focused message on taxes, wealth, political power and propaganda.
Sometimes we hit it out of the park, sometimes we beat out a single. I'd say yesterday with the Free-baggers we stretched a double into a triple.
Now back to work.