THE LEFT IS THE RIGHT:
The radical right-wing roots of Occupy Wall Street (Maureen Tkacik, SEPTEMBER 20, 2012, Reuters)
If there's one thing that united Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party movement from the very beginning, it's a virulent aversion to being compared to each other.
The Tea Partiers started sharpening their knives before the Occupation even began. Two weeks before last year's launch Tea Partisan blogger Bob Ellis wrote a post entitled "Socialists Plan to Rage Against Freedom on Constitution Day" - all but daring the lamestream punditry to compare the "infantile" plans of "spoiled children" to "throw tantrums" and "thumb their nose at the American way of life" to the beloved movement that "sprang up from nothing a little more than two years ago in the face of a Marxist president and Marxist congress."
In reality, of course, no political movement springs "from nothing." Indeed, both of them have roots in the same man. Fifty-five years earlier that fall, the Tea Party movement's direct ancestors met in Indianapolis to launch their first bid to rally citizens against the "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" occupying the White House, Dwight Eisenhower. But when their beloved anti-communist Barry Goldwater was buried in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party moved swiftly to officially renounce the "radical organizations" that had sullied its public image. Then the most radical of the right-wing radicals, Goldwater's beloved speechwriter Karl Hess, moved into a houseboat, renounced politics altogether and dedicated the rest of his life to peacefully protesting the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the new aristocracy he dubbed "the one percent."
