Dana has a comprehension problem
by digby
Via Adele Stan at Alternet I learned that Dana Milbank is at it again. Milbank described Van Jones' speech earlier this week like this:
The Occupy movement is preoccupied.
In October, when liberal activists gathered in Washington, they had hopes that the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement would become the left’s answer to the tea party.
But this time around — the annual Take Back the American Dream Conference was moved up to June this election year — the Occupy encampments are gone, and participants in the conference were pondering what went wrong. Or, as activist Van Jones put it to them, what has become of “the voice that is missing.”
Jones, an Obama administration official who resigned under pressure because of his far-left positions, is a fixture at the annual gatherings and a fiery orator. But this version of his yearly pep talk was laced with disappointment. “I’m watching that movement that inspired the world . . . that stunned the world, in the moment of maximum peril now sit down,” he lamented at the opening session...
Milbank was obviously too busy playing Words with Friends to hear the speech (or too drunk to understand it) because according to Stan, Jones said exactly the opposite.
Jones essentially laid into the national liberal establishment -- the institutions of the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement -- for failing to act with gusto in the current presidential campaign, and for abandoning the recall effort in Wisconsin...
As a contrast, as examples of courage in the face of opposition, he used the examples of the "young people" of the DREAM Act movement, the anti-Keystone movement, the LGBT rights movement -- and the Occupy movement:
Look at the young people who rescued America last year, coming out of that horrible August when the Tea Party put Congress in a headlock and said, "If you don't do what we say, we're going to blow a hole in the American economy; we're going to destroy America's credit rating." And this whole town trembled in fear and gave in and said, "We'll create a super-committee to do super damage to the American people." And some young people and some strugglin' folks -- no pollsters , no lobbyists, no big grants -- went down with some sleeping bags and some tents to the scene of the crime against their future, and occupied Wall Street, and turned this country upside down.
That piece has already been published in newspapers across the country and I haveno doubt that every Villager chuckled over the silly progressives and their silly, silliness.
Click over to Alternet to read the whole thing and it will also give you some email addresses to which you can send a nice polite note to the Washington Post about their dishonest coverage of the event.
The sad thing is that most people won't hear what Jones had to say about the liberal establishment's failure, which is truly interesting. But then that's also something that would make the Villagers very uncomfortable so we can't have that.
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