President Obama and many other Democrats have embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement. Among local Dems to have very publicly sided with the protesters are Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and U.S. Rep. Brad Miller.
Others have included The News & Observer, in editorials, glowing news stories that hide the malodorous aspects, and in columns. You get the feeling that these are either aging hippies like N&O columnist Jim Jenkins or folks who wish they had been alive back when people really knew how to stick it to The Man.
Another wistful backer of these smelly miscreants is senior associate dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University Gerald Lee Wilson. In a column I linked to the other day, Wilson wrote this:
But Occupiers, for the most part, do not want to overthrow the capitalist system; they just want the opportunity to participate fully in it.
Just on the face of it this is hopeless naivete or willful ignorance. You don’t need a Ph.D. to see what these people want. It’s written on all their signs, and it certainly is not capitalism.
But don’t take my word for it. Just go to the official Occupy Wall Street website and you’ll find that “stomping out capitalism” is their chief goal.
I don’t know why Duke deans, the mainstream media, and our state’s Democratic politicians find it so hard to understand this.
