Occupy Bomb-Throwers

Kevin O'Brien has a piece at the Cleveland Plain Dealer talks about the Occupy Movement's continued slide toward the lunatic fever swamps. The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Occupiers are a motley collection of rapists, druggies, vandals, slobs, naifs, all mixed together with incoherent economic arguments, and recent developments have done little to burnish their image.

Speaking of the arrests of five men who plotted to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, O'Brien says:

There was no danger to the public because the explosives were inoperable and were controlled by an undercover FBI employee, the agency said Tuesday in announcing the men's arrests. The target of the plot was a bridge that carries a four-lane state highway over part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in the Brecksville area, about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland, the FBI said.

What a lucky, lucky week this has been for Greater Cleveland -- especially for whichever unsuspecting souls were driving across the Ohio 82 bridge across the Cuyahoga Valley while five petty criminals associated with Occupy Cleveland were trying to community organize it.

The Occupiers, authorities tell us, thought they had rigged the span with plastic explosives that would detonate when they punched a code into a cellphone. The only thing that went up in smoke, though, was their plot. They were working with dummy devices -- fitting -- sold to them by an FBI informant whom they failed to recognize as the Man.

The arrestees are being dismissed as "fringey," which is downright hilarious, considering who is offering the description. Their self-description as anarchists is being presented as an indication that they're outside of the Occupy "mainstream." Yeah, right.

Take the anarchists out of an Occupy protest and you're down to half a protest. More likely, the bomb plotters are just a little ahead of the curve.

The people who proclaim the nonviolence of the Occupy movement are, for the most part, sincere. But they're riding the tiger.

As the local Occupiers try to regain their stride, we'll hear comparisons to the violence and division supposedly preached by the Tea Party, the movement Occupy was ginned up to counter. We'll hear how Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was really the leading edge of the Tea Party.

Most people, though, will have the sense to recognize the difference. Here's an idea that might generate some useful data: Let's have the FBI infiltrate both movements. Ten years from now, if they both last that long, we'll tally up the arrests and see which side has occupied more jail cells.

This summer will tell the future of the Occupy Movement. It seems to me that, bereft as they are of any coherent policy proposals, the only way they'll be able to keep the nation's attention is to become increasingly confrontational. If they don't, the movement will flicker out. If they do, the bomb-throwers and left-wing ideologues will gain more control and violence will accelerate. I suspect, though, that the movement is so heavily infiltrated by the F.B.I. that it'll all come to naught. Either way, I don't think the movement has much of a future.