GROUP HUG: STILL NOT IMMINENT

Frank Bruni today:

The disconnect between the seriousness of our angst and the silliness of our politics -- between how big our problems are and how hopeless or just plain stuck the people who are supposed to address them seem -- defies belief. Right now the system isn't working, and a recognition of that is one of the ties that bind Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. They don't identify the same villains or promote the same solutions. But they're flowers of a shared frustration.

That's utter bollocks -- and really, why is it so important for so many people to find common ground between the tea party and angry people on the left?

I'm sorry, but the teabaggers didn't mobilize -- or perhaps I should say weren't mobilized -- until after the inauguration of Barack Obama, even though most of the the things they complained about (deficit spending, the Wall Street bailout, the very existence of taxation or a social safety net) predated Obama's election. And they've never felt the level of disgruntlement with the sytem that Occupy does -- from the beginning they've found dozens of elected officials who suit them just fine, many of whom have actually been elected. You can't possibly say that about the Occupy protesters, whoknow they're well to the left of President Obama and the Democrats, even if the GOP is much further to the right.

The Occupy protesters are upset at a system that's failed them under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The tea party will utterly vanish the second its ideological soul mates seize control of what few parts of the government they don't control already, even if those soul mates don't enact a tea party agenda. (Did we hear a peep from any of these people when George W. Bush was running huge deficits or expanding government health care with the Medicare prescription drug plan?)

Occupy wants real change. The tea party wants a change in political control. That's it. End of story.