When some Politician wants to take credit for something simply for political gain, well, they will.  It seems to be part of human nature to want to be part of "a winner" and certainly Elizabeth Warren showed her human nature in wanting to boast "I’m a Wall Street Occupier" when she came out with:

I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do

Now, combine that with Elizabeth Warren’s Intellectual Foundation for Warrenism:

You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Yeah, tell that to the guy in Oakland who actually had to face down that marauding band of Occupy Oaklanders whose underpinnings come from her moral code. 

Oakland developer Phil Tagami is used to working behind the scenes to broker some of the biggest deals in town. Late Wednesday, he was using different persuasive skills – holding a loaded shotgun to scare away rioters trying to get into a downtown building.

"We had people who attempted to break into our building," the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said Thursday. He grabbed a shotgun that he usually keeps at home, went down to the ground floor and "discouraged them," he said.

"I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it – I didn’t point it – I just held it in my hands," Tagami said. "And I just racked it, and they ran."

Although they didn’t get inside the building – Tagami, 46, oversaw its $50 million renovation and has an office there

Once again, Individual actions and self-reliance have trumped collective-reliance on the collective.  Now, Conservatives understand from a pragmatic standpoint

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And I think this is one of the things that drives the Left absolutely batty.  Even as they are all about the Collective, unlike the Founders,  they just are flabbergasted that the Right, made up of people purporting to be wrapped around Individualism, basically have out-collectived the Collective.  Matt Kibbe, the head of FreedomWorks (an organization that has helped the TEA Party, and I have met and talked with Matt and other representatives of FreedomWorks as a TEA Party activist) wrote this Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine):

Despite all of this, in America Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by many in the media and the Democratic party as a legitimate counter to the tea party. All of the accusations that were wrongfully hurled at the tea party—from bigotry to violent tendencies—now seem to be occurring regularly at OWS protests. Yet they are ignored in deference to the supposed morally superiority of this new movement. Van Jones, formerly an environmental advisor to President Barack Obama, says we should ignore OWS defects because "they’ve got moral clarity." Even Mr. Obama has said that "the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."

Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the left. Can the king of crony capitalism win reelection having codified "too big to fail" into law? Can Congressional Democrats, having spent the past two years attaching Republicans to so-called "tea party extremism," now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence and property damage of OWS?

Progressives’ burning desire to create a tea party of the left may be clouding their judgment. Even Mr. Jones has grudgingly conceded that tea partiers have out-crowd-sourced, out-organized, and out-performed the most sophisticated community organizers on the left. "Here’s the irony," he said back in July. "They talk rugged individualist, but they act collectively." He and his colleagues don’t seem to understand that communities can’t exist without respect for individual freedom. They can’t imagine how it is that millions of people located in disparate places with unique knowledge of their communities and circumstances can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate, creating something far greater and more valuable than any one individual could have done alone. 

Indeed – an "Army of Davids" which is the name of the book that Glen Reynolds wrote in describing how technology is shifting such that individuals can band together for a purpose via the ‘Net, accomplish a voluntary goal, and then disband in ways that never would have been possible before.  In fact, many Conservatives and TEA Partiers used the Internet to get their message (visual: Skip waving his hand!) out and coordinating with others in a joint movement.  I am pleased that GraniteGrok has been part of this movement and have participated in tactical events both in State as well as National ones.

Moral Clarity?

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We here at the ‘Grok all support the Second Amendment – and love to exercise it!  So when Glen over at Instapundit ran this link, and TMEW and I having just "upgraded the armory", I had to go take a look at the post over at The Truth About Guns on self-defense shotguns.

Read the post, but the main points were:

Pump Action – "There are hundreds of stories of home intruders being scared away simply by the sound of a pump action shotgun being racked…Pump action shotguns have a feature that makes them ideal: reliability."

Short Barrel – The shorter the better. 18 inches is the legal minimum length for a shotgun without venturing into $200 tax land, but if you have the time and the money it might not be a bad idea to get the stamp and break out the hacksaw.

Attached Shell Holder – …Due to their massive size you can’t really load all that many into the gun at one time. So if you get into a protracted gunfight you may very quickly become screwed. The solution is simple: keep extra rounds on the gun…The other reason for a shell holder is to take advantage of both buckshot and slugs.

Pistol Grip – While the standard shotgun stock will work just fine a pistol grip makes the whole thing a lot more ergonomic.

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From the NY Post (emphasis mine):

Some 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters saw red yesterday — giving an enthusiastic welcome to a genuine communist.

Alex Callinicos, a professor of European Studies at Kings College in London, announced to his rapt audience, “I am a Marxist.’’

Asked if the upcoming revolution can be non-violent, he parroted the party line of the demonstrators, who call themselves the 99 percent of Americans lined up against the “1 percent’’ with power and money.

He said violence could be avoided only if the “1 percent accept the decisions of the 99 percent,’’ which he predicted would never happen.

True to form, this Leftist walked up to "the line" and let his audience listen between the syllables for the true message.  If he had really been truthful, he would have simply said "yes", but just couldn’t resist the Class Envy that Marxists (and many academics) posses.

"Accept"?  The entire underlying premise of this movement can be summed up in one phrase:

They stole it.  We’re gonna take it.

(notice I didn’t say "back") That is it. Simple, isn’t it?  And that makes everything leading from that perfectly legitimate.  Prosecutor, witness, jury, and judge – Marxists love to wrap these roles all up into themselves, and he does! 

Therefore it follows, since the 1% are thieves, they should be demonized.  And once demonized, they have surely already been convicted, right?  The final step?  They, the 1%, must be punished.

However, here’s their magic key – the good Marxist Professor provides for the ultimate "out" – on your knees and beg forgiveness.  Give us what we demand, and we will let you go (yeah, we saw how this worked out in the French Revolution and the Bolshevik one as well).  Give us what you have – we’ll let you quietly go. 

This is, in their terms, what Democracy looks.  We make the demands, you acquiesce.  Just like a Jr. High bully picking on a 4th grader on the way home.  How is this any different than the mobster saying "pretty store you have here – pity if something were to happen to your Mom".

In this Marxist mindset, the 1% must be punished but again, in their minds, this "out" allows them to feel blameless if the trigger needs to be pulled (or the bat swung or knife sharpened.  And WHERE is that darn guillotine!) .

Thus, being thieves and therefore must be punished, it marches lockstep to the next which is the taking.  And the good Professor Callinicos is the one issuing the call for it.

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