Lords of Finance vs. Lord of the Flies

If you’re not already sitting down, you may want to steady yourself before reading further. Recent polls show that the Occupy Wall Street movement is unpopular with voters! Not only that, it appears—gasp—that the Tea Party is actually more popular than Occupy Wall Street.

Liberal bloggers think they have figured out why. Blogger Digby, a perennial source of quotes for the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, is outraged by the media’s portrayal of the movement, especially that of the New York Post and other outlets said to toe the conservative line: “It’s always gratifying to see the press defend the right of the authorities to restrict the First Amendment. The right wing has been pushing this theme of the occupy people being anti-social sub-humans defecating on the sidewalks from the beginning.”

We seem to recall that there’s another newspaper aside from the Post in New York, and it’s considered a bit more influential. Just last week, the New York Times ran an article by famous Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs proclaiming Occupy Wall Street as the birth of a new progressive movement.

However, if the public is more inclined to see Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of antisocial people defecating on sidewalks than effective champions of the downtrodden and oppressed, that’s not because they’re being misinformed. It might be because the occupiers are actually defecating in public (video findable by Google, if you have a strong stomach and a masochistic streak). Despite what the occupiers would have you believe, there are precious few issues on which you will find “99 percent” aligned in agreement, but condemnation of dropping trou in public remains one of them.