I took my daughter to school, and had a nice walk back. It's a short walk, but it's pretty in the morning. When I returned, I spent a little time on the Daily Kos. I read a little bit about Operation American Spring.
Operation American Spring, or OAS, as the friendlies referred to it, was intended to be a gathering of 3% of the nation's population. They imagined that if you could get just 3% of the country to come to DC, they would be able to peacefully, PEACEFULLY DAMMIT! subdue the President, bring him to justice for his treason, and then hit the sack early so they could get up for the morning devotional on CBN.
I think they thought they had reasonable logic. Even by the most favorable estimates, Obama is roughly at 50% approval rating. That means that there are, according to them (probably, I don't know) 150 million Americans who are sick of it. If only a fraction of them showed up, the tyrant in the W__te House would be coming down!
Later in the afternoon, I got hooked in to watching the live stream from the Marc Connors show. Marc Connors was streaming live on Ustream, and there was an unmoderated chat room available. The stream had roughly 1200-1300 viewers at any time.
That number dwarfed the actual number of people in attendance at the event. The Washington Times, that liberal bastion of heathen paganism, estimated just 300 people on the first day I watched.
So, they were only 10-30 million short on the estimates of who was coming.
What I found was a rapidly scrolling stream of Twitter sized comments that remained on the screen in the chat for roughly 2 seconds. That is not an exaggeration. You would think that more than 1200 viewers of the stream would have the ability to type a comment or two, but most of the traffic was people mocking the hell out of the event.
A constant stream of derisive chatter scrolled by faster than any Rascal Scooter could go.
Operation Pick Up my Social Security Check
That's pretty much what it was. There were some scarce moments during which they actually showed the crowd on camera. Looking at the crowd was like some grungy version of the early mall walker crowd. I suggest that maybe 75% of the people there were getting some kind of check from the government every month.
Things I found out about Operation American Spring:
1. There were actually more people there, it's just that they were dressed in a way that allowed them to blend in. You see, these are people who are aware that there are agents of the government in every corner of the world, and therefore, they would have to attend this public protest in disguise.
2. Many people were trapped in some location where there was a flood or something.
3. A caller from Virginia called the show on Friday and told Marc that she had heard from a reliable source that there were hundreds of tanks on the road towards Washington, "as we speak." Marc Connors is even handed. He made sure that his listeners knew that he was "just reporting it." Very even handed. I thought about how cool it was that everyone there was going to get their own tank, just for coming to Washington.
4. I sat there listening to this idiot on the phone talking about Zionism and all that goes with it, and not one of the right wingers in the chat room had the moral bravery to tell the idiot to shut the hell up. In fact, if you ask a right wing chat room if they have read "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," they will start to discuss the positive qualities of it. If that happens, then you are a race baiter. I told them, "No, I'm a racist baiter."
5. The second day was as good as the first. In fact, the host of the live stream show was talking about how everyone was coming out and having a great time, and how they were going to be trying to get a million views on their stream. According to Marc, the problem was that most of the people who came to this event (presumably to cover the event) had not planned well enough to need enough battery power to use their cameras for more than the first few hours.
Get that? The reason they couldn't provide any live feed of the Saturday event? Everybody had run out of battery power, and I suppose the evil Washington establishment was preventing them access to power.
6. Every conversation you have with a right winger from now on should simply avoid discussing whatever they want to talk about. You should just talk about ending corporate lobbying, and regulating the size of banks.
They have absolutely no argument against those things. If they want to talk about climate change, ignore them. Instead, ask them if they support regulating the size of banks, and ending corporate lobbying. If they do, direct them to movetoamend.org.
If they want to say that Obama is a Kenyan, "Hey! Are you in favor of ending corporate lobbying?"
Obamacare? "Hey, banks are too big! Do you agree?"
7. If you didn't "serve," then you can't discuss the situation.
8. Hell and stuff.
9. Eventually, it all comes down to the trolls and the moles. That's how they kept putting it. Negative comments were from trolls. Media blackout. You know, the regular stuff. If they'd cover it, people would come!
Apparently, there were also moles. I'm not sure who the moles were, but they were apparently the ones who were making OAS (Not at all like OWS, the people who actually did sleep outside overnight) look like idiots by saying anti semitic things.
10. Obama was so threatened, he went and had a sandwich.
11. Guns keep them safe. I told them I always appreciate it when people put stickers on their cars and homes to let me know where I can harvest weaponry for my black market sales.