Operation American Spring
Is “Operation American Spring” a joke or something? On the one hand, I get the impression that it’s a thing made up by some nobody group that liberals are touting just to make fun of it—but then I see just enough conservatives making noise about it to give me the impression that it is, somehow, “for real.”
It is now famous, of course, for projecting “millions, as many as ten million” patriots to descend on Washington D.C., after which a million will camp out in the capital, thus leading to a revolution.
How this could be taken seriously by anyone is rather beyond me. Just the logistics alone would crash the event within hours—assuming, of course, that even minimal expectations were met. Reading the event’s web site show that they pretty much toe the line on every piece of hyperbolic, paranoid, conspiracy-theory conservative tripe imaginable.
But here is what really convinced me the whole thing was a joke: their site’s HTML. Look at this snippet:
is the OFFICIAL Operation American Spring</font></font> </font></font></strong></h1>
Yes, that is the long-ago-deprecated “font” tag. I’m surprised their tags aren’t all-caps. Looking through the code, it is hard to say what caused all of this. The competing font tags declaring different faces and sizes, not to mention multiple font tags around a single snippet of text, suggests a likely old WYSIWYG app where the font was changed back and forth. However, applying a “strong” tag within an “h1” tag? Alternating between “b” and “strong” further down in the code? Either it was a really bad app, or someone tinkered. Usually apps declare themselves in the meta tags in the head, but not here. Heck, maybe this was hand-coded by a really stupid person.
Anyway, the event, as has been reported with no little hilarity, has turned out “tens” of people. The event’s organizer made some pretty bizarre claims about the reasons for the turnout:
“We were getting over two inches of rain in hour in parts of Virginia this morning,” Mr. Milton said. “Now it’s a nice sunny day. But this is a very poor turnout.” … The weather likely delayed some from showing, he said. But as the sun comes out, and the weekend weather dawns balmy, more could show, he said. …
He also said the some of the planned Operation American Spring members who were planning to head to Washington, D.C., instead traveled to Nevada, to give support to cattle rancher Cliven Bundy in his fight against the federal government over grazing fees.
“A lot that were supposed to come here went there instead,” Mr. Milton said.
Yes, I remember all ten million showing up at Bundy’s ranch. I’m sure they left after the racist press conferences, and are now just held up in traffic somewhere.
Ah, wingnuts. They’re destroying the country, but they’re so funny when they do it.
To go Godwin here, what the right really needs is a powerful big mouth to sell the BS to the rubes.
Romney was a greasy cold fish, McCain was a recycled cranky old man, Bush was a serial-failure cornpone moron who got everything in his life as the grandson of a CT Senator and son of Reagan’s war-hero VP, and while Reagan could talk the right’s message he was bounded by the Dems holding the House during his administration (though of course much of the 1980s (D) coalition was still southern conservative).
Hell, the best salesman conservatives have had is probably Clinton and Obama. They’ve been doing their bidding, first with NAFTA, then Graham Leach Bliley, and now PPACA.
(There’s been kabuki about other stuff but Clinton and Obama are far, far away from Bernie Sanders, my guy if I could pick the President).
Cruz certainly provides the mouth. He may have misplayed his hand in 2011-2012 in trying to shutdown the gov’t like the GOP did, but maybe not, as a first-termer any press is good press I guess.
The 2014-2016 cycle is going to suck. Need a 10′ square hut somewhere provisioned well enough to be able to ignore it all.