Conservative trucker protest fizzles

story http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/11/1246415/-Conservative-trucker-protest-fizzles?detail=email

Or not. (TheObamaDiary|Twitter)

As expected, the purported conservative trucker protest intended to clog up the Beltway this weekend, aka the "Truckers Ride for the Constitution," has turned into a bit of a bust:

Police say a convoy of about 30 trucks began traveling north on Interstate 95 from Doswell, Va., on Friday morning. The truckers are circling the Beltway.

However, the presence was not quite the thousands of truckers that organizers had predicted, or the ten thousand Fox News had asserted. On Friday morning, just a handful of people had showed up at a key staging area.

Thirty trucks is indeed not thousands of trucks—the math checks out, though there have already been some attempts Twitter unskewing of the number by posting an old picture of a Make-a-Wish trucker convoy and claiming success.

The conservative trucker rebellion was a bit dodgy from the outset. Purported vows to block the Beltway were later waved off by organizers as a hoax to garner media attention. The organizers are a motley crew of conspiracy theorists, including one who believes that Osama Bin Laden was Barack Obama in a Hollywood-created, CIA-provided disguise, because they both have the same "bone structure" and are both left handed, and a radio host who is an avid 9/11 conspiracy theorist and who promised a "bloody battle" if the trucker protest was not sufficiently successful in … dissuading the government from confiscating all the guns, or something. It's not clear.

The released demands of the group, now that we have them, are impressive. They include an assertion that members of Congress were in on a plot:

… to change Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution on eight separate occasions to make it possible for Barack Obama to meet the eligibility requirements for the office of president. Of which, a legal investigation has proven that his documents provided are forgeries, which is a felony offense.

And that the government has:

… illegally put our military in a "War Zone" where they currently, guard opium productions and transport, police the people of other countries based on US law, they get authorization for military action from the United Nations Security Counsel, which is High Treason, and they are exposing, and administering experimental, psychotropic, mind altering drugs for control over soldiers during secret, clandestine operations.

The list of demands is to be delivered to Rep. Louie Gohmert, because of fucking course it is.

So presuming about 10,000 more conservative truck-drivers do not appear out of thin air anytime soon, it would appear that the conservative trucker protest is, like most other bits of the movement these days, a failed plot based on a collection of conspiracy theories whose naturally invisible successes will be retold by the group in future conspiracy theories. A bit unnerving to think that these thirty-ish people drive trucks around our highways on a daily basis, but there you go.