My impressions of Occupy DC (9 pics)

My impressions of Occupy DC (9 pics)

Last week-end I was in DC for business, but I had a little down time on Saturday night. So, I hooked up with The Tea Party.net’s Tiffiny Ruegner and headed out to Occupy DC to see what we could see.

First off, it is noteworthy that the Occupy Movement seems to have a permanent tent city set up in McPherson Square. Tiffiny found that to be particularly galling since she’s helped organize Tea Party rallies across the country and has at times had to pay through the nose for relatively short protests. Meanwhile, when there are liberals involved, they’re allowed to live in the park without having to pay for it.


Tiffiny Ruegner gets all “radical”

Of course, when you have a filthy tent city that’s teeming with homeless people, you need some rules. Here’s my favorite rule from their posted list.

Oh, and did I say filthy? Tiffiny and I started chatting with an ex-gang member with tattoos on his face….now, don’t get me wrong; he wasn’t filthy. Believe it or not, he actually came across as an extraordinarily nice, well meaning guy. Ironically, he was from ANOTHER Occupy protest a few blocks over and he wasn’t particularly impressed with what was going on at the protest we were at. Anyway, while we were talking to him, I saw an actual, honest-to-goodness RAT walking from tent to tent. Tragically, I could not get a snap off before the rat disapeared into a tent. We also had a nice long conversation with a liberal blogger who was at the protest and recognized me — which is really weird because usually no one ever recognizes me anywhere except for a small smattering of people at conservative conventions. So, what are the chances that someone at an Occupy rally would pick me out of the crowd?

After talking to the blogger, we walked over to listen to the “general assembly” talk and it was actually remarkable for the banality and emptiness of the discussion.

Every speaker seemed to be saying something like, “I think the key thing to recognize is that it’s important for our voices to be heard. That’s why what we’re doing is important. As long as we recognize that key issue and its importance to getting people’s voice out, I think we’ve achieved our purpose.” It was like listening to a group of 8 year olds doing their impression of what a meeting’s supposed to be like on the playground.

Let me also add that the whole scene was a little seedy. People living in tents, some people who were obviously high, blasting music at times, lots of homeless people, and a few shady looking characters walking around…

Setting aside the fact that there are rats there and you could probably catch Ebola from touching the dirty tents, it’s not actually somewhere that struck me as a safe place to stay overnight. Pointless, unkempt, and rat infested is no way to go through life — even for liberals.

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