Polls. If a full 45% think that Obama is some kind of Kenyan spy and another 33% think he's a Secret Muslim, well, those people may not be the movement's driving force per se, but they're a large enough contingent to make politicians think they're worth pandering to. Politicians generally don't say crazy $#!^ unless they think there's something in it for them. Look at the laws that state legislatures have been passing (or trying to). There's the "Presidential candidates have to present their birth certificates to run for office" law. And the "show me your papers because you look like you could be an illegal immigrant law". And then you get Herman Cain saying things like local governments should have the right to ban mosques. If the nutters were such an insignificant fringe, then why are the politicians kissing their arses so enthusiastically?

If you show me a poll showing that 45% of the OWS supporters think that there's a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, or want to overthrow capitalism completely, then I'll change my mind about them. It's also a matter of degree. Maybe the daft hippies and hypocrites are representative of a large part of the OWS movement. They wouldn't be the first or last band of protesters to be made up of incoherent flakes. But even their worst members seem fairly harmless. If they had signs up in favour of lynching bankers and looting mansions, if they called their opponents Hitler and routinely brought semi-automatic weapons to rallies, my impression of them would be very negative. As for the politicians pandering to OWS, the most populist firebrand of them all seems to be Elizabeth Warren, who wants to, um, regulate banks some more and pass some laws to protect consumers.

If someone reported a #occupy poll that 45% of the protestors thought there was a Jewish conspiracy, or whatever, I'd be just as suspicious of that number as I am of the "agree with the birthers" number. Collapsing opinion into neat polling categories can turn a "eh, I don't know, seems weird he hasn't yet released the full form certificate" (true at the time of the poll) into something that can be reported as "OMG RACIST" and get a few more click-throughs on the article. I'm pissed off by peoples efforts to malign either movement, and attempts to dismiss the genuine hurt and outrage behind each with ridiculous side issues. Yeah, they differ radically in their ideas, but I'd much rather support an honest expression of outrage from someone I disagree with than try to heap crap on them.

It wasn't just one poll. A bunch of polls by different organizations, all of which gave people the opportunity to say "I don't know" or "I'm not sure", found remarkably consistent numbers of people agreeing with the statement that Obama was foreign-born. Even a poll which prompted people to name Obama's birthplace themselves, without any multiple choice options, found a full 20% of Americans (31% of Republicans) naming a foreign country of their own accord. Although the good news is that support for birtherism dropped a lot after Obama released his long form birth certificate. Which gives me optimism that Rick Perry's latest attempt to jump on the birther bandwagon will fail.

I think that the Tea Party has legitimate reasons to be angry about the state of the country, but I absolutely do not support a lot of the ways in which this outrage has been expressed. I refuse to support reckless expressions of hatred. Because it helps nothing. When Republican politicians believe that their base thinks their opponent is a Hitler-sympathizing terrorist-supporting secret Muslim traitor Marxist, no compromise is possible. No solutions are possible. Look at the completely unnecessary debt ceiling blow-up. Look at the way John Boehner refuses to consider any debt reduction package that contains a single cent of tax increases. Look at the absurd tests of ideological purity that the Republicans are now imposing on their candidates, in which it is political suicide to say that global warming is anything other than a liberal hoax, and the only acceptable policy proposal is more tax cuts. The extremists don't even need to be in the majority. They just need to be a big enough minority that is loud and obnoxious enough to control the debate.

So far I have not seen equally poisonous rhetoric from OWS. Despite Fox's attempts to tag them with the anti-semitic label, even the American Jewish Committee says, "Eh, not really." And just a few pages ago, OldCrow was arguing that they don't even seem that angry. If the worst thing you can say about them is that they're a bunch of incoherent spoilt hippies who don't look angry enough, then they're not equivalent to a movement that routinely invokes Godwin's Law.

Kea, that looks like the same guy from this article.

So yeah, the best example of anti-Semitism from OWS is not actually part of the group.

Locking a thread? #OccupyPOOP!