Compare and Contrast

I had a conversation with a dear friend recently -- a friend who is almost certainly more liberal than I am, but also probably more apolitical than anything else -- and she made an off-handed comment comparing the Occupy Wall Street crowd with the Tea Party as though they were cut from the same cloth.  Obviously, I personally hold the Tea Party in much higher esteem than I do the Occupy Wall Streeters just based on my politics.  But let's take a moment to compare (or rather, contrast) the behavior of these two groups and the ludicrousness of thinking they are anything alike.

In the Occupy movement, we have a man pooping on a police car, reports of assault (both regular and sexual), rape and attempted rape (and I believe this just covers the actual protest in NYC), there was also that incident of arson that I blogged about here, and finally the news this week of a baby being found alone in a tent at the Occupy DC protest.

For the Tea Party, we do have an alleged incident of protesters spitting at my congressman John Lewis and yelling racial slurs -- I don't think it happened, but others can and certainly do disagree (but in the age of near ubiquitous video by phones, it's telling that to date, no video has surfaced of this alleged incident).  There was some violence in Ft. Lauderdale when the ANSWER folks staged a counter-protest to the Tea Party and rallied their troops with the all-too-familiar charge that people who hold conservative beliefs must be racists.  A man named Kenneth Gladney was also beaten at a townhall meeting in St. Louis where many Tea Partiers had turned out to protest the healthcare act -- except that he was beaten up by union thugs, not by the Tea Partiers.  There were also general reports that those attending Tea Party protests picked up after themselves and left behind little trash, in contrast to the major cleanups needed for the Occupiers.

So, to recap:  comparing the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is like comparing apples and rotten apples.  Or comparing oranges and oranges that rape, assault and poop on other oranges.

What frightens me about my friend's comment is that for people who don't pay a lot of attention to these things -- but who still vote every four years -- the Tea Party and OWS are one and the same.  It's depressing.