One Way in Which Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Should be Different

Catching up after my one day vacation from blogging yesterday, I noticed two items that are somewhat related getting a lot of attention. The first was a comparison by President Obama of the Tea Party and the Occupy protesters, the other was a poll of the Occupy crowd at Zucotti Park.

First things first; there seems to be some debate over whether Obama's assessment is accurate. But that debate seems to be over the headline ABC News chose to give its post on the web -- "Obama: Occupy Wall Street 'Not That Different' From Tea Party Protests." Left and right seem to bristle at the comparison, but if you bother to look at what the President actually said, it's hard to see any way to call him wrong.

"I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests," Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in the interview to air this evening on ABC News "Nightline" from Jamestown, N.C.

"In some ways, they're not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren't looking out for them," he said.

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The Anti-Patriots

What is America?

That seems to be a major point of contention these days. Is the nation a support system for the wealthy or is it a place were we can say "we're all in this together?" Republicans seem to have taken the former view and have been busy rewriting history to conform with a new political correctness. For them, the American Revolution was a rebellion against taxation by what seems to be a bunch of extremely pious anarchists. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen -- by no means a wild-eyed liberal -- compares the Republican Party to a cult. It would seem that this cult has developed a new creation story -- one that bears very little resemblance to the actual founding of this nation.

John Nichols looks back at the comments of Thomas Jefferson on the 50th anniversary of our founding and finds an expectation of reason. Far from being a religious zealot, Jefferson mentions God only to dismiss the idea from government. "All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man," Jefferson wrote. "The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."

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