The French Quarter Attack WAS Political…

The French Quarter Attack WAS Political…  by macaoidh …you have to more or less suspend disbelief not to recognize that.

But based on various agendas, it seems like that’s what’s going on. Beyond the reactions of left-wing journals, when those sources have reacted to this story at all, we notice that Allahpundit at HotAir.com and Michelle Malkin have both gone out of their way to disparage the idea that the attack had to do with politics.

The attack was political. But, and I think I’ve been clear on this and hopefully in this post I’ll be even clearer, while it was political it doesn’t appear that it was partisan. A distinction like that used to be fairly easily understood.

For those who don’t grasp the difference between political and partisan, it’s pretty simple. In our modern parlance, partisan means Republicans vs. Democrats. Political can include everything else. Like, for example, anarchist revolutionaries.

How do we know this attack was political? Well, three developments in the story of the beating of Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown last Friday in the French Quarter have served to make it almost patently obvious that Bautsch and Brown were attacked out of a political motive…

1. Louisiana GOP chairman Roger Villere told Hayride contributor Walter Abbott that he was chased by protestors outside of Brennan’s into a cab. Villere said that he couldn’t leave the restaurant through the front door when it was time to depart the fundraiser because the protestors had blocked that entrance; and when he and his group left through the kitchen to the back door, they were seen and pursued. Villere caught a cab in the nick of time and made a getaway.

2. The police report of the incident makes clear that when Bautsch and Brown left the restaurant an hour or so later, there were still protestors on hand. Those protestors immediately set to making catcalls to the couple, and as they headed for the car they immediately realized they were being pursued just like Villere had been. The fact that the demonstrators pursued both Villere AND Bautsch and Brown is a chilling one; it also calls into doubt any explanation for the attack other than a political motive. While the NOPD has obviously taken scrupulous pains not to make public statements to the effect that politics was involved, the police have also not ruled it out. Sgt. Nick Gernon of the 8th District, who is heading the investigation (I’ve been reliably informed that despite the widespread disparagement of the NOPD both in the New Orleans area and elsewhere, Gernon is a first-rate detective committed to running a thorough inquiry) has not spoken to the media to date so there is no reason to discount a political motive. And I could have predicted to you from the beginning of this saga that the NOPD was not going to announce a political motive publicly until suspects were identified and arrested; that NOPD Public Information Officer Bob Young let the cat out of the bag and made statements to the effect that politics was involved before hustling back to the status quo was a mere momentary departure from that expectation.

3. Bautsch’s mother Della Berning’s appearance with Megyn Kelly on Fox News, which Connie Hair of Human Events has transcribed, makes clear, as does the police report, that the catcalls and insults hurled at Bautsch and Brown were “all about money.” The police report quotes Brown as recalling one of them was “You think you’re f**ing special” and that there were comments as to how sharply attired the pair were. Let’s remember that both the protest of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference venue at the Hilton Riverside and the redirect to Brennan’s were organized by the Iron Rail Book Collective, whose nature we’ve documented ad nauseam here – the Iron Rail Gang are self-described anarchist revolutionaries, and as Mick Wright at the Tennessee Conservative blog does a devastating job of demonstrating through photo evidence found on the internet from the protests at both venues, they were quite explicit in manifesting that identity during the events in question. Not only that, the Iron Rail people initially bragged about “lots of confrontations” last Friday and how “New Orleans bared its teeth and snarled, and rich plutocrats shat themselves in fear” before the light of scrutiny was shone on them – at which time rather than issue pointed and explicit denials of any role in what happened to Bautsch and Brown, they took down Facebook pages and YouTube videos which documented their protests both at the Hilton and at Brennan’s.

I hardly think it’s necessary to spell this out, but a communist anarchist who makes disparaging remarks based on socioeconomic circumstances about someone he suspects to be a conservative Republican before descending upon said Republican and beating him or her savagely is doing so from a political motive. Economics + communism = politics. It’s not brain surgery. Particularly given that the anarchists’ propaganda both before and after the event was shot through with hateful references to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s “rich friends” and so on.

Given that we now know that people who were at the protest at Brennan’s pursued attendees at the fundraiser on two occasions and successfully attacked attendees once, one has to be incredibly suspicious that Daniel Mauch and Joanna Dubinsky would have “gone dark” the way they did. Perhaps it’s not an admission of guilt, but any cop will tell you that it’s classic guilty behavior. They might as well have fled in a white Bronco.

So obviously this attack was political. But that doesn’t mean it was the work of Democrats. There are other people in the world outside Republicans and Democrats. There are the white supremacists, skinheads and neo-Nazi types, for example. And while it’s a favorite tactic of Democrat political types to paint conservatives as ideological kin to those folks, there are scant few on the mainstream Right with any affinity or common cause at all to be had with that fringe element.

I would like very much to think that anarcho-communists such as those you’ll find at the Iron Rail Book Collective are analogous to the white supremacist crowd, in that conservatives can agree they don’t represent the views of or share any allegiance with the mainstream Left.

It appears fairly clear that last Friday, the Iron Rail Gang was able to bamboozle a few mainstream Democrats, namely some well-meaning but easily duped students and professors at the University of New Orleans, into attending their protest at the Hilton. After all, they roped in a brass band for a second line march on a Friday afternoon, and anyone with a knowledge of New Orleans and its traditions knows that a second line is a good way to draw a crowd in the Big Easy. That the protest was couched in the relatively mainstream policy ends of restoring budget cuts in higher education and rebuilding a public hospital knocked out of commission by Hurricane Katrina when Jindal has chosen a different path was a nice way for the anarchists to put a veneer of respectability on their event. If you’ll look at the PDF files of the flyers the Iron Rail people created for the event and hosted at their web site (see the single-sided one here and the double-sided one here), they look relatively inoffensive. The two-page flyer says that Jindal “and his Republican fat cats are destroying Louisiana healthcare: closing hospitals, firing workers,” which is red meat, but not particularly ominous.

But there was also an eight-page brochure the group put together that did not appear on the Facebook event page for the protest (since removed – there were 209 people who had RSVP’ed for the event and from that roster we found Mauch and Dubinsky), and that brochure was much more ominous. It listed several “Points of Unity,” among them being:

- The SRLC is not welcome in NOLA without a fuss

- Recognize healthcare as a basic human right

- Oppose police oppression, the prison-industrial complex, and the dominant culture of militarism

- Recognize the need for active resistance to confront all forms of oppression, respecting a diversity of tactics

The brochure also contained a map of the five hotels at which SRLC delegates were primarily staying, which is extremely disturbing, on the same page as this statement:

The SRLC is being held the same weekend as the French Quarter Festival. Centered at the Hilton Riverside Hotel at the confluence of Poydras St. and Convention Center Blvd, the SRLC will bring a multitude of unwelcomed outsiders during a traditionally New Orleanian celebration.

On page 6 of the brochure was the following:

Saturday, April 10 – all-day – Street Theatre & Direct Action

We welcome everyone, organizations and individuals alike, to take some time to send their own personal message to the SRLC and its attendees. Saturday is a day of direct action, a time for people to take to the streets, autonomously, and demonstrate their opposition to the policies and politics of the Republican party. While the focus of our Second Line will be about the destruction of health care, inequity and oppression in our city affect all aspects of our daily lives: education, employment, police, the prison-industrial complex, etc. To the streets! Show Jindal his harmful politics are not welcome in New Orleans. Our numbers are many, let our presence reflect our dissatisfaction with the status quo. The Republicans do not offer solutions. The people have the power. Let that be shown.

It must be said that very little happened on Saturday, though before he pulled it down Daniel Mauch posted on his Facebook page that he was open for more “mischief” and for those interested to call him. Page 6 of the brochure also said:

SRLC attendees will be spending most of their time in the CBD and the French Quarter. Show them that ignoring the health and well-being of the people for corporate profit will not go unnoticed.

Mauch, who talked to Tennessee Conservative’s Mick Wright for an hour outside of the Hilton, was in possession of a flyer announcing the “afterparty” protest at Brennan’s, which he gave to Wright while scrawling both the address of the Iron Rail Book Collective and the name of the YouTube account which once hosted the protestors’ video files. On those videos Dubinsky could be seen inviting the protestors at the Hilton to join her at Brennan’s. As said above, both have taken actions in the last 48-72 hours which can be construed as covering their online tracks.

It is in light of the above that one can conclude, perhaps to the exclusion of anything else, that the attacks on Bautsch and Brown which are documented in the police report and in Bautsch’s mother’s account originated from Brennan’s protestors. The protests at Brennan’s were much more hostile and intense than at the Hilton, where a larger group which included more mainstream types constituted the majority of the demonstrators. The brass band wasn’t playing at Brennan’s, either; this was no cute second-line march. The well-meaning folks at the first protest were obviously peeling off by the time the Brennan’s affair was winding down, and as such this thing wasn’t about ordinary Democrats.

As I said above, the group which needs intense scrutiny here are the anarchist revolutionaries of the Iron Rail Book Collective, who organized a party-like protest at the Hilton with the express purpose of distilling it into something much more sinister at Brennan’s. The attack came from demonstrators at that protest, and as such it was political. It only becomes partisan if, and I very fervently hope there is no reason to believe this would happen, the mainstream Left chooses to stand with, act as apologist for or condone the actions of anarchist revolutionaries.

But for those, including some on the Right, who insist upon distilling all matters political into the neat little buckets of elephants and donkeys this distinction is perhaps impossible to perceive. If that’s the case, and if the Right can’t distinguish Democrats from anarcho-communists while the Left sees Republicans as a worse political enemy than the students of The Coming Insurrection, we are in a lot more trouble than we think.

For the original with links: http://thehayride.com/2010/04/the-french-quarter-attack-was-political/