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Congressman John Lewis is not as offended as he could certainly have chosen to be over the silly, ungracious, completely predictable “process committee” decision not to interrupt their meeting to allow him to speak:
Congressman John Lewis came out to Occupy Atlanta on Friday, October 7th in Woodruff Park. He even commented on the Atlanta General Assembly’s group consensus process saying “this is not something strange or out of the ordinary for me,” and he was “not at all” disappointed he wasn’t able to adress the Assembly. Video Colby Blunt
Congressman Lewis has been through much worse, and also has personal experience with the refined sensitivities of political process committees:
Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: ‘Which side is the federal government on?’ That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence.”
And concerning the other Occupy/Together fooferaw of this weekend (dissected here earlier by Zandar), Suzy Khimm’s Wonkblog post “Conservative journalist says he infiltrated, escalated D.C. museum protest” is currently the top entry on the Washington Post‘s “Most Popular: Business” sidebar. Complete with cache link to Howley’s original article:
A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have instigated the events that prompted the museum to close.
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Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)…