Occupy San Diego Protester Asks For Moment Of Silence For White House Shooter

The media’s embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been cause for bitter frustration on the right, where the feeling is that the Occupiers are getting a fairer shake than the Tea Party did. Today, the conservative blogosphere is abuzz about a video of an Occupy San Diego protester asking for a moment of silence for the White House…and the guy who put a bullet into a White House window. It’s a strange moment, for sure, but hardly worth the comparisons some are making.

At the tail end of a rally at San Diego Police headquarters, a protester stepped up to the microphone (an actual microphone, not a human one) to ask for a moment of “silence and solidarity” for the White House, which was the victim of a shooting over the weekend, and the troubled alleged shooter, Oscar Ramiro Ortega.

It’s an odd moment, and one which reinforces liberal stereotypes about compassion and inclusion (what conservatives call “bleeding heart”), but conservatives are asking questions along the lines of Ace Of Spades‘ rhetorical overreach: “If anyone in the Tea Party expressed solidarity with Jared Loughner (and if a group of Tea Partiers than bowed their head in respectful silence for him), do you imagine the media would have been interested?”

If there was a way to go back and make it so that Loughner (the shooter in the tragic Tucson massacre earlier this year) only managed to ding a pane of bulletproof glass, I bet we would all take that deal. It’s a hideous comparison, variations of which are all over the conservative Twittersphere.

It’s silly, too, because their point, that this exact moment would have played very poorly against the Tea Party, is completely valid. Why undercut it by comparing Ortega to monsters like Loughner and Timothy McVeigh?

Tea Party or not, I would still feel bound to point out the best part of this clip, which is the bewildered look on the face of the woman who hands over the microphone. Her reaction is a bit of slow-burn comedy worthy of Jack Benny.

Here’s the clip, from Occupy San Diego:

Update: The protester in question, 27-year-old Tyler Kai LoRusso, says that he was “misunderstood”:

“Whoever shot at the White House is basically a terrorist,” LoRusso tells CityBeat, “and I was holding a moment of silence for the White House and President Obama and everyone in the White House. I wasn’t holding a moment of silence for the terrorist in any way. We’re a peaceful movement, and we don’t support people shooting at the White House.”

…we asked him what he was thinking last night as he asked for his chance to speak and he said:

“I was just thinking how terrible it is that our nation has someone who tried to shoot at our White House, our country’s main deal, and that’s what makes our country beautiful is that we have a White House that carries all the establishment that makes our country awesome.”

While there are some who have clearly misunderstood Tyler, accusing him of “celebrating political violence,” his explanation doesn’t gibe with what he actually said. Perhaps he has since thought better of urging empathy for the troubled alleged shooter (he even referenced the rumor that the shooter was an OWS protester himself), but in his original remarks, that’s what he did.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.