"The People's.." Fill in the Blank

Anytime someone has a rally or function and calls it "the People's" this or that, bank on it being a socialist rally. 

Case in point, climate change marches happened this week around the world, one big one in New York.  A reporter writing for Grist took a train trip from California to the Big Apple with about 170 attendees of "the People's Climate March" (they called it the People's Train while riding there).  In talking to one of the on board organizers she got this quote:

Make sure you have a lot of grandmothers at your protest, says Marina Skinner, who worked as a deputy field organizer for President Obama’s first campaign. “When you see an 80-year-old person, that is your walking billboard.”

And don’t be afraid to censor the protests that you are in charge of. “You are giving birth to a new movement,” Skinner says, “and one of the things that you learn in birthing class is that you are in control of your own birth.

When Obama and Biden were campaigning, if someone was holding a sign that wasn’t their message, they just told them to take that sign down. It was as simple as that. The civil rights movement did it. You can do it too.”

In other words, do anything or say anything, because the goal is so important that lying, deception or obfuscation are OK. After all it's for the planet!  And the children!  And 80 year old grandmothers!

This ends justify means principle is used by both sides in politics, but generally speaking conservatives tend to feel guilty after doing it while liberals tend to embrace it wholeheartedly.  Case in point, the president's gumby-like handling of the truth leading up to the 2012 election...


It's one thing for this principle to be used with campaign promises. It's quite another for it to be used with factual issues, such as a health care plan or the state of the climate.  Yet there's Al Gore five years ago, giving us science lessons and bold predictions that turned out to be a pile of dog poop.  The pie he got in the face for those gaffes never approached a slow day of news about Sarah Palin.  Contrast it to how Jon Stewart just came down on a few GOP congressmen.   

This week the same president who, as Stephen Colbert might say, was 'truthy' about his own health care plan and threats from foreign terrorists in 2012 will be telling everyone on Earth about the need to 'sacrifice' to save the planet.  What sacrifice?  Well, that's where the People's Climate March comes in, part of which became "Flood Wall Street":  they point to the sacrifice being the end of western capitalism.