‘There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.’ So said the wonderful Edmund Burke, and he would be appalled by gazing on the throngs of indolent wastrels (as he would undoubtedly call them) tying up the traffic and patience of the population in London, trying to make some point about the economy that seems beyond their understanding.
The Occupy London crowd is trying the patience of even the liberal London political establishment. An effort to spread to more commodious surroundings in Trafalgar Square was stopped cold by the police, as reported in the Daily Mail:
Abandoning the ‘softly softly’ approach that allowed demonstrators to close St Paul’s for the first time since the Blitz, police cleared the makeshift campsite in just 90 minutes.
The protesters, who attempted to occupy Trafalgar Square, were demonstrating against tuition fees and government cuts.
But the no-nonsense tactics meant there was no repeat of the St Paul’s occupation – or of the violence that erupted at last year’s student protests.
Instead, police came close to outnumbering demonstrators by two to one as more than 4,000 officers patrolled the capital, while demonstrator numbers were estimated at around 2,500. Many were thought to have stayed away after senior officers warned they would use plastic bullets if violence escalated.
Two web logs are doing yeoman’s work in keeping up with the squalor, inanity, crime, and blatant appeals to revolution (violent and otherwise) in the variety of Occupation sites populated by some who are truly frustrated with the dismal economic situation (though their efforts are misdirected), but by a large majority of others who apparently have nothing better to do while they wait for their government checks. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit is cataloguing the many stories by the Tweet hatch #occupyfail, and John Hinderacker at Powerline recommends OWS exposed, for continuing coverage.
Our "main-stream" media (and oxymoron, if there ever was one) continues to treat the Occupy Wall Street group and their national clones as independent, uncoordinated efforts with legitimate concerns, even if they cannot be expressed. One wonders what forbearing tax payers will think when they get the bills for cleaning up after these wastrels.
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