Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Tale Of Two Rallies

19 Comments

I’d also like to see a compare and contrast between the mess left behind by both crowds. It’s a striking metaphor: the vast majority that wants peace and freedom to live their lives, and the small tyranny whose main goal seems to be to deliberately increase societal entropy. There are never as many of them as they want us to think there are — it’s why they come up with duplicitous names like “Bolsheviks.” Or “progressives.”

[Update a few minutes later]

I asked, and via Charlie Martin, we have received:

The bottom line is this–while it’s amusing to look at the pictures of all the trash left behind by the labor unions and left wing socialists, they aren’t going to give up their efforts to win on November 2 just because we’ve proven we are much neater than they are at rallies. Depending on which count you pay attention to, they did manage to persuade somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 or so to come out on a Saturday. If you look closely, you’ll note that many of the attendees arrived on buses paid for by SEIU and other labor unions. You can bet that these groups will be throwing money around “like drunken sailors” over the next 30 days to get the crowd that littered the Mall Saturday to show up at the polls on November 2. We would be unwise to take our eye off the ball now.

Yes, clearly, neatness is not a value with them. Power is.

[Update late Sunday evening]

Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?

Appropriate, considering it’s from a site called Crooks and Liars…

[Monday morning update]

High-school students received class credit for attending the rally.

Did anyone attend this mini rent-a-mob who wasn’t bribed or coerced? And why do I suspect that they wouldn’t have gotten similar treatment for Glenn Beck’s rally?

19 thoughts on “A Tale Of Two Rallies”

  1. You don’t need to be neat when you have an assumption of the lower classes (subjugated political enemies) who will be made to clean up behind you. How many times have we read, at Huffington and similar enclaves, about conservatives, ’rounded up’, ‘behind wire’, in ‘prison camps’, etc.

    They can’t keep everybody locked up all the time.

  2. When the message doesn’t really mean that much to you, then trashing it on the ground is what you do with it when you are done.

  4. I saw the pictures of the trash, and to me, it didn’t look like that much trash, but above I see the picture of the crowd, and it didn’t look like much of a crowd, so the question is the trash/participant ratio, which may require the use of Feynman Diagrams, integration over the ensemble making up the trials in the probability distribution, and the renormalization “trick” to avoid taking ratios of very small numbers.

  5. The other thing about “union organizers” is that there are apparently also “Hispanic immigrant organizers.”

    The reason I say this is that back not that long ago, President George W Bush was advocating Comprehensive Immigration Reform and then was left hung out to dry by the conservative base.

    Part of President Bush taking this position is coming from Texas, sharing a border with Mexico and having a Hispanic community, from recent immigrants going back to old-family blue-bloods who took the side against Santa Anna’s army. Don’t you remember President Bush speaking Spanish at rallies, with pronounciation and grammer as mangled as his English?

    Part of why Comprehensive Immigration Reform hit the skids is that there was this nationwide May Day rally of Mexican and other immigrants. Like rallies of its kind, it was meant to “call attention” to the many Hispanics among us, legal or otherwise, and I guess maybe have us collectively hanging our heads in shame that we didn’t legalize the undocumented, and NOW!

    That mass, national rally, it seems had the opposite effect. Seeing the huge crowds at demonstrations, there was the reaction of “h— s—!”, we are being invaded and overrun.

    Seriously, I am thinking that May Day rally was a turning point in stopping Comprehensive Immigration Reform, that it had the opposite effect intended by its organizers.

    I also think I had received an advanced “heads up” regarding this rally. I had served on Hispanic Council at church, and every once in a while attend Spanish-language Mass, to know at least something about what is taking place in church when I would show up for Council meetings. The one time I was at Mass, wouldn’t you know it, some rather earnest looking people who were unfamiliar to me from Council, and pretty much everybody who was anybody in any kind of church-related leadership in the community would show up to a Council meeting every now and then, these earnest people were handing out flyers to the people leaving church, essentially telling them about the pro-amnesty demonstrations planned for the First of May.

    In fact we talked about the presence of “organizers” handing leaflets “to our people” at Council meetings and decided to take a live and let live attitude, provided they did their leafleting or organizing outside of Mass and outside the Sanctuary.

    The Hispanic Council members were thus the “leadership cadre” of the Hispanic community at church, and I am sure to a person they favored some kind of Immigration Reform, but we didn’t talk the politics of this at church meetings and the “organizers” were non-church members and a different group and perhaps mind-set of people. On the other hand, there was some discussion on Council regarding the “manners” of some of our parishioners and some discussion about how “back in Mexico City” people attending church were for some reason better mannered and more reverent in church. It seemed that there was a tiny glimmer of recognition that the undocumented immigrant population was not perhaps the Mexico of back home but may have represented an uncultured underclass that a person may not have had as much contact with back home.

    So back to the organizers. I guess organizers are organizers, whether they are union organizers or Hispanic immigrant organizers. The organizers may be of the people they are organizing (what union rank and file guy is against job security, better pay, etc; what person of Hispanic heritage wants to see their brothers and sisters shipped out of the U.S.?), but the organizers are not the people being organized.

    It is dawning on me that organizers also know only one mode of operation, that of scolding earnestness, and they do their thing, but it only gets them so far. We shall see what happens in November.

  7. The Hispanic Great American Boycott was an eye opener not only because of the size of the crowds, but also because of the number of Mexican and Che flags carried by the marchers. They didn’t repeat that mistake at this year’s marches.

  8. Got to love the comments that it’s not a ‘fair’ comparison since the pictures were obviously taken at different times of the day…

  9. I don’t navigate the warren of liberal blogs like I do the conservative ones but haven’t been able to find a picture of this event at its peak.

    While communist and socialist literature and signage was very prominent, I only saw 2 American flags.

    The One Nation website has this interesting pic.
    http://action.onenationworkingtogether.org/index.php/content/splash_b/

    They say videos and pictures of the event will be posted online but that part of the web site must not be working.

  11. No, it doesn’t. Those photos are all consistent. You just don’t understand how to view them. The ones showing the crowds close up are the same people that that you can see along the reflecting pond in the aerials. The close-up shots make it look as though there are a lot more people than there are. If you’re not regurgitating, yourself, look more closely at them.

  12. Good link Real Rallt.

    This picture is blurry but does show more people than the animated gif. The crowd doesn’t look as dense as the Beck rally but there is a lot of people there. http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/politics/one-nation-working-together-rally-hits-dc-201001002-ncx#64387265-2

    The CBC picture is a little clearer but the crowd looks pretty sparse in some areas. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/02/rally-lincoln-memorial.html

    The picture used by the One Nation website doesn’t look to be from the event. There are clouds in the sky. Also there is a lack of staging equipment close to where the speakers would be. Here is a bigger image. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H3T9c3zCcFM/TKd2p7gv_fI/AAAAAAAAA7Q/V5cp5a7_vYM/s1600/one+nation+march.jpg

    Not nearly as many as at the Beck rally but still a decent turnout. I bet TDS will get a better turnout than One Nation and maybe Beck’s as well.

  14. I bet TDS will get a better turnout than One Nation and maybe Beck’s as well.

    I gather by TDS, you mean “The Daily Show”? As an aside, it’s always good form to identify an unusual acronym when you first use it.

  15. I had to look it up to confirm, but the Bolsheviks really were a majority in the context they got their name from – a narrow victory on one minor vote about party leadership.

    Of course, they were only a “majority” of the Party…

  16. Dontcha think that photo is a little disengenuous, Rand? Because, ah … reality seems to disagree with your presentation of it :

    I agree with Rand here. For example, this picture shows a crowd in front of the reflecting pool just as in the animated gif. You also can see lawn on both sides of the reflecting pool stretching back which shouldn’t be possible, if the crowd were packed, especially since you’re viewing them almost edge on. That’s consistent with the moderate density surrounding the reflecting pool seen in the animated gif. We can’t see the large open space (which is in the left side of the animated gifs), but the parts we can see are consistent.

    The thing to remember about crowd shots from near ground level is that you are looking at the crowd from the side. They will always look far more numerous than an overhead shot (unless you’re dealing with massive crowds whose extent cannot be seen from ground level).

  17. I clicked the Real RAllt link. The bottom shows the same picture that is used in the animated gif. It’s an aerial view that looks to taken from the Washington Monument observation deck. That is, it was far from the Lincoln Memorial looking at the Lincoln Memorial. The other pictures that shows lots of people in front of the Lincoln Memorial was taken from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

    What the Washington Monument shows that the Lincoln Memorial does not show is the large open area south of the reflecting pool and lining trees. That area, roughly 500,000 sq ft, is nearly empty during the One Nation Rally. It’s packed at the Restoring Honor rally.

    But that said, this is all a hilarious debate for people to have. I tell you what, Real Rallt. Let’s say One Nation had the larger rally. Let’s say they had 175,000 to 250,000 people. And we’ll go with the CBS news estimate of 87,000 people at the Restoring Honor rally. Well then, there you have it. You won the rally size debate. You’re awesome. Really, really Real Rallt awesome.

    We’ll see you on November 3rd. And by all means, keep telling people the vote will be close. No need for anybody to get cocky.

  18. There was a short article on the rally in the freebie newspaper in the Montreal subway this morning. I believe it was a standard AP article, like most of the paper.

    They used the Tea Party rally as a picture to illustrate the One Nation rally. Wonder why?

  19. Consider one group came by bus and the other came at their own expense.

    I still worry what thugs on the ground and discovery of new votes in close elections will do, but things are encouraging.

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