Jim Hightower: Bush Zones Go National

[reprehensor]

Bush Zones Go National

At the 2000 GOP nominating convention in Philadelphia, candidate Bush created a fenced-in, out-of-sight protest zone that could only hold barely 1,500 people at a time. So citizens who wished to give voice to their many grievances with the powers that be had to:

1. Schedule their exercise of First Amendment rights with the decidedly unsympathetic authorities.
2. Report like cattle to the protest pen at their designated time, and only in the numbers authorized.
3. Then, under the recorded surveillance of the authorities, feel free to let loose with all the speech they could utter within their allotted minutes (although no one - not Bush, not convention delegates, not the preening members of Congress, not the limousine-gliding corporate sponsors and certainly not the mass media - would be anywhere nearby to hear a single word of what they had to say).

Imagine how proud the Founders would be of this interpretation of their revolutionary work. The Democrats, always willing to learn useful tricks from the opposition, created their own "free-speech zone" when they gathered in Los Angeles that year for their convention.

Once ensconced in the White House, the Bushites institutionalized the art of dissing dissent, routinely dispatching the Secret Service to order local police to set up FSZs to quarantine protesters wherever Bush goes. The embedded media trooping dutifully behind him almost never cover this fascinating and truly newsworthy phenomenon, instead focusing almost entirely on spoon-fed sound bites from the President's press office.

An independent libertarian writer, however, James Bovard, chronicled George's splendid isolation from citizen protest in last December's issue of The American Conservative. He wrote about Bill Neel, a retired steelworker who dared to raise his humble head at a 2002 Labor Day picnic in Pittsburgh, where Bush had gone to be photographed with worker-type people. Bill definitely did not fit the message of the day, for this 65-year-old was sporting a sign that said: The Bush Family Must Surely Love the Poor, They Made so Many of Us.

Ouch! Negative! Not acceptable! Must go!

more@link

[phantom power]

1. Here's some scary stuff

"You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act. I've heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."

Wow. If you disagree with our war, you're a terrorist. And I'd have to say that "economic impact" is pretty damned broad, as a definition for terrorism.

[struggle4progress]

2. Obvious misuse of the Secret Service:

<snip>
At Bill's trial, a Pittsburgh detective testified that the Secret Service had instructed local police to confine "people that were making a statement pretty much against the President and his views."
<snip>

<edit:> Be sure to check out South Carolina Progressive Network's "Keeping America a Free Speech Zone (or What to Do When George Bush Comes to Town" manual
http://www.scpronet.com/free_speech_manual.pdf

[tXr]

3. Just the fact that free speech 'zones' even exist

is completely ludicrous. Is * so weak-willed that he cannot abide any dissent? Apparently so, since stories such as this are, sadly, becoming all too commonplace. It is as if wherever * goes he feels the need to surround himself on all sides with lackeys holding mirrors, so that wherever he turns, he is confronted with nothing more discomfiting than the reflection of his own, 'royal' visage. I am no psychologist, but *'s behavior must be indicative of some type of personality disorder (narcissism, infantilism?). The pictures of the 'Free Speech Zone' at the Convention in Boston made me sick!