Monday, September 14, 2009

The 9/12 March on Washington, D.C.

In case you were unaware, there was a big protest march in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, perhaps 1,000,000+ big. It appears that the protesters share my deep concern about the continuous, staggering growth in the federal government, including but not limited to its current spending binge. According to Bryon York of the Washington Examiner:

Some people were animated by a single issue -- health care, taxes, the Second Amendment. But in dozens of interviews with marchers, the picture that emerged was of people who believe things are racing out of control along a whole range of fronts in Washington, and that no one is representing their interests. Obama and the Democrats in Congress, they believe, are simply pushing too hard on too many things. It's unlikely that there would have been a rally this size just about the stimulus, or just about cap-and-trade, or just about the takeovers of the auto companies, or even health care. But put them all together, and there is an enormous and growing fear that Obama and his allies are rushing to wreck the system.
Reason.tv has put together this video about the protest that tries to capture the marchers' concerns. From the looks of it, the protesters were remarkably normal:



Indeed, while I have seen some commentators, such as Maureen Dowd, say that the protesters main motive is the color of President Obama's skin, his administration has correctly tried to put this assertion to rest:

A day after tens of thousands of conservatives gathered in Washington to protest the policies of the Obama administration, a top White House aide said that President Obama doesn’t think the protests and the growing conservative movement against Obama are motivated by racism.

“I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

Pointing to the upcoming first anniversary of the collapse of investment banking giant Lehman Brothers, Gibbs said he thought the anger directed at the administration stems from the federal government’s unprecedented intervention in the private sector during the financial crisis that began last fall.

No comments:

Post a Comment