OT: How bad will the NYC Republican convention protests get?

[Maple Leafs]

... or, depending on your perspective I suppose, how "good" will they get?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/08/11/rnc_protest/print.html
(Oh shut up, if you didn't have time to take 20 seconds to watch a quick ad to support a web site then you wouldn't be clicking around here all day.)

Notable parts...


If you're a delegate attending the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC.

His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an e-mail account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican Party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails with inside dirt on GOP activities. Recently, a woman with a polished, middle-aged sounding voice left a message saying, "For some God-unknown reason I'm on the Republican mailing list, and they sent me what they call a list of their inner-circle events." The events hadn't been publicized elsewhere, she said, and she wanted to fax the list to Moran.

Moran feeds information like this to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.

"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says Moran, who has sandy hair, a snub nose and a goatee. The son of a retired Queens cop, he's 30 but looks younger. "I'd like to see all the Republican events -- teas, backslapping lunches -- disrupted. I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted -- anything from occupation to property destruction."

...

Something similar happened in November, when some 10,000 union members and retirees demonstrated at a free-trade summit in Miami. They were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry, paid for in part by a little-noticed $8.5 million appropriation tacked onto the Iraqi reconstruction bill. Videos taken at the scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and pepper-sprayed in the face.

"For a brief period in time, Miami lived under martial law," concluded a scathing report on police misconduct issued by a local panel charged with investigating the debacle. "Civil rights were trampled, and the sociopolitical values we hold most dear were undermined."

...

Yes, the cops will be out in force. "But there will be so many protests," he says, snapping his fingers. "Here 5,000, here 500. Popping off in all these different places. The cops will be stretched thin. Tempers will rise. All hell will break loose. That's what everybody wants -- they just won't admit it."
(Emphasis added)

So I think there are two questions here:
1. Will we see large scale protests, or is this all a bunch of hot air?
2. If the protests turn violent, does that help or hurt Bush?

[rkmsuf]

hot air

[albionmoonlight]

I think mostly hot air. NYC will be a police state for the duration of the convention, both to prevent a terrorist attack and, as a side benefit, to quash things like this.

FWIW, exercising one's right to assemble in peace and protest the government is noble and right. Fucking Shit Up in the name of protest is criminal and deserves to be treated as such.

To answer your second question, it helps Bush to paint the majority of left leaners and independents against him as vandals, petty thugs, and misguided wanna-be revolutionaries. So violent protests would help him.

Which problem hints at a larger issue. The left wing in this country needs to get away from the 60's hippie caricature of its position that the right wing has successfully created. It allows right wingers to incorrectly portray reasoned liberal discourse as non-intellectual--ultimately nothing more than a washed out acid flashback. Protests like the one described above only serve, IMO, to reinforce that fallacious image.

[NoMyths]

These types of folks represent the extreme fringe of the left-wing. Wackos are going to be wackos, whether they want to scream at a delegate while he eats dinner with his family or whether they want to turn Baghdad into a sea of glass.

[Peregrine]

I hope they can keep it in check. Honest protests are one thing, but when the wackos come out, the people who are mostly interested in causing destruction to somehow raise awareness of their cause (exactly how is awareness raised by vandalism and destruction of property?) it gets ridiculous to even call them "protesters."

[cthomer5000]

I don't know or care, but it's going to make my already brutal commute an absolute fucking nightmare.

[NoMyths]

I hope they can keep it in check. Honest protests are one thing, but when the wackos come out, the people who are mostly interested in causing destruction to somehow raise awareness of their cause (exactly how is awareness raised by vandalism and destruction of property?) it gets ridiculous to even call them "protesters."I agree. These so-called "anarchist" groups are asinine. And oxymoronic.

[GrantDawg]

And people are shocked and outraged when these people are called terrorist.

[Peregrine]

And people are shocked and outraged when these people are called terrorist.

I'm not sure I would call them terrorists, but I certainly would call a lot of them criminals. It's too bad that the legitimate protesters get tarred with the same brush.

[Castlerock]

I live in Boston and there were almost zero protesters for the DNC. Granted, the Democrats are not the group in power so they are not the target of much of the anger but my guess is that it will be far less than expected. I think there were 2 whole arrests in Boston during the DNC.

cthomer, Boston had Draconian road and transit closures. The media scared everyone so badly that no one came into the city (it was a ghost town). For most of those that did, it was the best commute ever.

[rkmsuf]

I live in Boston and there were almost zero protesters for the DNC. Granted, the Democrats are not the group in power so they are not the target of much of the anger but my guess is that it will be far less than expected. I think there were 2 whole arrests in Boston during the DNC.

cthomer, Boston had Draconian road and transit closures. The media scared everyone so badly that no one came into the city (it was a ghost town). For most of those that did, it was the best commute ever.

they should have a convention every week. Smooth sailing.

[Buddy Grant]

I've got a question - who will terrorize the terrorists?

[Drake]

Canadians?

[Jon]

I don't know or care, but it's going to make my already brutal commute an absolute fucking nightmare.

I couldn't agree with this any more. BTW, a friend of mine is a public defender in NYC and the courts aren't scheduling any trials during that week. IN addition, the group has told the protest organizers that the protesters should already have attorneys ready in the event that they get arrested since they are going to be on the bottom of the list as far as representation is concerned. (Before anyone gets upset about this, the public defender is only required to handle the cases of those financially eligible. Time and time again they end up representing people who aren't eligible at arraignments, but because of the concern that eligible people will be arrested, they get first dibs at being represented by a public defender).