On this week's Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol suggests that the Occupy Wall Street protesters need to have an "electoral strategy" and help to defeat Democratic legislators in primary races, just like their AstroTurf "tea party" so heavily promoted by Fox did. Naturally no one else on the panel reminded him that the people out there in the OWS movement protesting, don't have any of that Koch brothers money funding them.
This was also yet another example of the very derisive type of coverage of the OWS movement we've seen from Fox in general, and where most of them were dismissive of the idea that anyone on the Democratic side of the aisle either will or should pay attention to the protesters concerns, or just more or less mocking them as Kristol was doing here. It really is just night and day from their fawning promotion of the "tea party" protests and whether or not Republican legislators should have paid attention to them.
WALLACE: What do you think of how the two parties are playing this?
KRISTOL: I think Republicans should be quiet. I mean, these are demonstrations against the party in power, which last I looked, was the Obama administration. They hate the current regulation of Wall Street which is being governed by a law called Dodd-Frank. Last I looked, Dodd was a Democratic senator and Frank was a Democratic congressman.
Wall Street is represented by a Democratic congressman, Jerrold Nadler. So I'd say Republicans and conservatives should step aside and let the left fight this out. I mean, who knew the left was suffering from such Tea Party envy? That's what strikes me.
They want their own Tea Party. You read these leftist columnists, they need the energy.
Weren't we being told a year ago or even a few months ago that the Tea Party was the worst thing that could have happened to the Republican Party, it's a bunch of extremists, it's going to destroy the Republican Party? And now they realize that, because the Tea Party strengthened conservatism, and they wish they had their own version of it.
But, what did the Tea Party do? This is A.B. -- what did the Tea Party actually do in 2009 and 2010? They defeated a whole bunch of Republicans in primaries, right? They elected people, or, in some cases, defeated people that didn't win in the general.
They had real electoral clout. And if I were running Occupy Wall Street, they need to defeat. They need to defeat Senator Gillibrand in the Democratic primary in New York, or Congressman Nadler in the Democratic primary in lower Manhattan, or someone.
WALLACE: And move the party to the left?
KRISTOL: Yes, they can't -- otherwise, it's just talk. I mean, they need to have an electoral strategy.
Full transcript available here.
