from politicons.com

There’s a memorable scene in the movie “The Killing Fields” where, barricaded inside the walls of the French embassy in Phnom Pen after the fall of the Cambodian capital to Marxist guerrillas, a group of Western journalists peer through its windows at the arrival of a truckload of Soviet diplomats. A Khmer Rouge insurgent, in what at first appears to be a triumphant gesture for Communism, lifts high above his head a framed portrait of Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. He holds the portrait high in the air for a full three seconds — before smashing it against the ground into 100 pieces. The Soviets, it turned out, were in the same boat as everybody else when it came to the Khmer Rouge. 

I was reminded of that scene over the weekend, albeit in less dramatic fashion, when viewing the effigy of President Obama erected at the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park. It suggested the same concept as the smashed Brezhnev portrait in “The Killing Fields”: This group wants no bosses.  It strives ideological purity.

No one expects Occupy Wall Street to morph into a murderous guerrilla movement – one can’t hold a Kalashnikov rifle and wiggle ten fingers in the air at the same time – and no one expects OWS to have lasting impact on the country’s political direction. But, based on the Obama effigy, one can reasonably expect the demonstrations to become more radical, because the Democratic Party is losing whatever grip it had on the protesters.

For a time it looked like the Occupy movements were becoming wholly-owned subsidiaries of the public employee union cabal and the Party of Jackson. Democratic officials were seen marching in their rallies, and Democratic elected officials, looking to borrow some of OWS’s mojo, held multiple news conferences at OWS locations.  But the Obama effigy represents a stark and dramatic break with that symbioses. It puts the Democratic Party on notice that it, too, is now in the cross hairs. 

These pages have argued before that President Obama lit the fuse to these protests with class warfare rhetoric.  Now it seems there is a very good chance they will blow up in his face.