Two weeks ago, MSNBC’s Donnie Deutsch mused that Occupy Wall Street might benefit from a kind of Kent State moment – “a climax moment of class warfare somehow played out on screen” – to simplify its message and win broad sympathy for its movement.

Today, OWS and liberal groups like MoveOn are disseminating video and photos of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, whose skull was allegedly fractured by a tear gas canister during the police crackdown on Occupy Oakland on Tuesday night, as that kind of moment. Olsen’s injury sparked protests in New York yesterday, and CNN reports that more demonstrations in solidarity with him are planned tonight.



Meanwhile, MoveOn’s ideological opponents at Big Government point to emails from the leaked Occupy Wall Street listserv as evidence that “that Occupy has long sought precisely the sort of spectacle Olsen’s injury provides, in order to win broader public sympathy and to rally Occupy activists around common opposition to the police.”

Big Government’s Joel Pollak argues that the movement is staging poignant images – like the widely disseminated photograph of the woman in a wheelchair being pushed through a cloud of tear gas in Oakland this week – as a deliberate media tactic.



“Push youngest/oldest to the front lines,” he quotes activist Charles Lenchner writing in one of the emails. “This is a battle over images, not just over the park.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Dan Buecke has a smart take on the limits of the Kent State comparison, and why this highlighting of violence, and all the Vietnam War era images of hippies-vs-protesters it evokes, could be a political liability for the politicians, including the president, who have expressed support for the protesters.