How the Bush crew deals with nonviolent dissent

[stonehearted]

Woman Disrupts Laura Bush Speech in N.J

Thu Sep 16, 8:10 PM ET

By JOHN P. McALPIN, Associated Press Writer

 

HAMILTON, N.J. - A woman wearing a T-shirt with the words "President Bush You Killed My Son" and a picture of a soldier killed in Iraq was detained Thursday after she interrupted a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush.

Police escorted Sue Niederer, of Hopewell, N.J., from a rally at a firehouse after she demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. Dvorin died in February while trying to disarm a bomb.

 

As shouts of "Four More Years" subsided, Niederer, standing in the middle of a crowd of some 700, continued to shout about the killing of her son. Local police escorted her from the event, handcuffed her and put her in the back of a police van.

 

Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released.

 

The first lady continued speaking, touting her husband's record on the economy, health care and the war on terror to those attending the rally in this suburban community of 90,000 people near Trenton.

 

She made several references to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and said that many in New Jersey, including some in neighborhoods near the firehouse, lost family members that day.

 

"Too many people here had a loved one that went to work in New York that day," Bush said. "It's for our country, it's for our children, our grandchildren that we do the hard work of confronting terror."

 

 

 

[AncientMariner]

In fairness to Bush accusing him of killing her son is ridiculous. Last time I checked military service is optional in the United States of America. If she is protesting against the war then organize a way to get Bush voted out of office but hurling personal insults at the President is hardly nonviolent dissent. Why doesn't she hurl insults at the house and senate as well? If you go into a public forum and hurl accusations at the President it is the duty of the secret service and law enforcement to insure the safety of the President. If you join the military there is a chance you are going to have to fight in a war. If you fight in a war there is a chance you are going to die. Everyone of these soldiers is aware of the risk and they chose to take on that risk. Blaming all of the evils of the world on Bush is cowardly. I know modern day spiritualists hate conservatives and anyone who isn't a liberal is evil but I just don't buy it. All I ask is that you kindly tolerate my difference of opinion and don't kill me just because I don't agree with you all.

[theist]

Exactly A.M.!

[stonehearted]

At least in memory? Chanakya says that the sypmtoms of a wise person include the ability to identify with anothers' suffering. This woman was distraught at the loss of her son in a war that many feel hasn't been adequately justified. And they have a right to hold and to express such an opinion, just as much as Bush's supporters have to theirs. Maybe you can't understand that. Besides, Bush is commander-in-chief, not anyone in the House or Senate. I remember that from my years of active-duty service.

 

And what must someone do for their dissent to count as nonviolent for you? Do you know what violence is? She was violent only in a figurative sense. Have you read anything about non-violent action? It's not huddling in your closet singing "Kumbayah" but directly confronting what you feel is wrong with strength, but without physical force. Read some Gene Sharp.

 

And just as many spiritualists here and elsewhere spout the same hatred of anyone they see as liberal. They feel that if you're not as right as Limbaugh & co., you're a Castro-loving, tree-hugging, baby-killing atheist. This is all due to the bodily conception. I say we make a room where all those who think they're liberals and all those who think they're conservatives, or any other material designation, can have at each other and leave therest of us alone.

 

Look--my posting that was nothing more than a comment on the way the Bush folks orchestrate their pep rallies, er, campaign appearances. They screen out anyone who seems reluctant to drink the president's foot-wash and arrest anyone who surpises them. It was not an endorsement of that woman's sentiments. Many of you here no doubt suspect I'm not a fan of Bush's. Well, I'm not so nuts about Kerry or any of the others, either. They are all grossly ignorant at best, possibly evil. And I don't give a damn what you say--they are all demons. Just see their arrogance, left and right. Whoever I vote for, it will be with a clothespin on my nose. And I sympathize with those who can't bring themselves to vote. It's Kali's game, and these guys are his handmaidens. We play at our own risk. How can we tell Kali's influence? There's hypocrisy and quarrel. How can we overcome it? Only one way: constant chanting of the names of Hari. Everything else is bullpucky.

 

And please tell me, brother, where the Hell this came from: "All I ask is that you kindly tolerate my difference of opinion and don't kill me just because I don't agree with you all." I tell you, I get a big kick out of the way the right plays the victim game, even when they have complete control of the government. Gotta love 'em.

[Guest guest]

That the butcher bush has an uncanny way of pointing at others for things that rest entirely in his hands. The house and se4nate did not make this war, they deferred to the fascists of the executive branch.

 

Hitler crushed dissent, and so does this moron demagogue. And yes it is voluntary service, and yes, my son is going over there to patrol the rivers virtually unprotected, and yess, he will be shot at, and yes, I blatantly call the commander in chief a cruel butcher nazi.

 

He is an incompetant fool, the biggest hypocrite to hit the political scene ever. His war plan seems to be a culling of our brave youth. His war plan seems to be a gift65 for the likes of binladin who he let go. His generals are quite confused about his competance as well, take a city at great risk against the generals well thought out advise, then abandon the same area, again against military advice, to the insurgents.

 

If kerry had any sense, he should be shouting for the international community to demand the arrest of these fascists. I would be proud to see our president to be dragged in handcuffs before a tribunal, to answer for the evils he has dont, to the world, to american youth, our military, to the constitution, etc.

 

His wife is absurd, and her pro-life stance is proven to be a hoax.

 

Republicans should read pat buchannan, who has a grip on what has happened to the cause of conservatism. But conservatives arent who bush is after for votes, he wants the ignorant and the brainwashed (by the radio right), and he may win by a landslide.

 

How can a real republican, a real conservative, vote for someone as fiscally irresponsible as bush. Barry Goldwater is turning in his grave.

 

mad mahax

[Guest guest]

Blanking Out Dissent

 

By DAVID LINDORFF

 

 

As the president races around the country, furiously pushing the twin lies that things are getting better in Iraq and that the economy is on the upswing, and ducking the reports that he hid from the draft in a National Guard unit and then went AWOL from even that cushy post, a huge, coordinated effort, largely unreported, is underway to insulate him and the media from any signs of dissent.

 

The latest evidence of this shameless and brazen trampling of the First Amendment to the Constitution is found in a lawsuit filed yesterday by the ACLU against the White House and the Secret Service on behalf of two West Virginia Republicans, Jeff Rank, 29, and Nicole, 30, who were arrested on July 4 at a Charleston, West Virginia, rally for President Bush, because they refused to remove two home-made T-shirts sporting the circle-and-slash "no" symbol superimposed over the word "Bush."

 

According to the suit, filed by the ACLU in federal court, even though the Ranks had tickets to the event, which was held on the grounds of the state capital, and were not being disruptive, city police arrested and handcuffed them, charging them with trespassing, and held them for several hours, on instructions of the Secret Service, the federal police agency that is tasked with "protecting" the president.

 

Nicole, who works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a notorious nest of right-wing loonies, was also temporarily suspended from her job following the arrests.

 

The charges were later thrown out, and the city council apologized to the Ranks for the incident, saying local police would never have bothered them had they not been ordered to act by the Secret Service. (Bush and the White House had no apologies to offer.)

 

As outrageous as this incident is, it is hardly isolated or unique. Back last year, I wrote an article in Salon Magazine, Keeping Dissent Invisible (Oct. 16, 2003), which documented how the removal of all signs of dissent from Bush and Cheney public events has been standard operating procedure, with instructions coming from the Secret Service and White House advance teams. Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief from Pittsburgh, PA, where police were instructed to fence off protesters in a remote baseball field during a 2002 visit there by President Bush, stated on the record that his department had been told what to do by Secret Service and White House staff. Around the country, protesters who have been similarly removed from presidential parade routes or rally sites, or arrested by police for simply carrying protest signs, have reported being told that it was "on instructions from the Secret Service."

 

Americans need to become aware how deeply antagonistic towards, and dangerous for American civil liberties like the right of free speech and assembly this current administration is.

 

Our corporate media, whose highly paid and well-groomed reporters prefer to travel with the presidential motorcade and to broadcast promotional soundbites from the president, don't even see, much less bother to track down and interview the many people who have the courage and principle to come and try to protest. As a result, the average American doesn't even know that there is a vast sea of opposition to this president and his policies.

 

Protests, as we saw in the coverage of the Republican National Convention, basically get reported on in the mass media only when there is violence or arrests.

 

It is significant that the ACLU's case brought on behalf of the Ranks, though announced in a press release that went out to all major media, was not even reported today in the New York Times, supposedly the nation's paper of record, which instead devoted most of its campaign ink to covering Bush's self-aggrandizing speech to a convention of the National Guard and to questions being raised about CBS's story exposing the sordid story of his Guard "service."

 

John Kerry reportedly had his campaign hire a Decatur, Alabama woman who was fired from her private sector job because her boss didn't like her having a "Kerry for President" bumper sticker on her car. Maybe he should start hiring all the people who are being rounded up, herded into "free speech pens" or arrested at Bush/Cheney campaign events. Besides giving him a lot of local on-the-ground support across the country, it would do wonders for his own tarnished image on civil liberties (Kerry has had precious little to say about the USA PATRIOT Act, for which he himself voted, and its trampling of the Bill of Rights), and would go a long way towards making up for his failure to condemn the use of a "protest cage" by Boston Police during his own nominating convention.

 

-

 

Another article

 

<a href=http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5004.htm>Keeping dissent invisible</a>

 

 

 

 

 

(But More Generals, Please...)

 

Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests

 

By MICKEY Z.

 

The August 26, 2004 New York Daily News headline blared: ANARCHY, INC. The idea, of course, was to paint the upcoming RNC protests with the broad brush of corporate media propaganda. An influential ingredient of wartime spin is shaping public perception of the anti-war movement. As a result, coverage of demonstrations is usually a tepid combination of low crowd estimates and footage of police arresting "unruly" protestors.

 

"War, and the threat of war, sells newspapers," says media analyst Danny Schechter. "Peace does not. The 'action' of war builds TV ratings. In contrast, the quieter work of diplomacy and negotiations is boring and not highly visual. War gives journalists a chance to show how brave they are in a macho sport where only the strong survive. Peace is far headier, an intellectual's vocation, a game for lawyers, softies and sissies."

 

Protest for peace also suggests the turbulence of the 1960s...turbulence that led Lyndon Johnson to conclude, "The weakest link in our armor is American public opinion. Our people won't stand firm in the face of heavy losses, and they can bring down the government." The protests didn't end with the Sixties. At a 1971 anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, 14,000 protestors were arrested. As author H. Bruce Franklin notes, 14,000 would have been considered a "good size march in 1965."

 

Clearly, our "memories" of that era must be purified.

 

"The antiwar movement has been so thoroughly discredited," says Franklin. "One would never be able to guess from public discourse that for every American veteran of combat in Vietnam, there must be twenty veterans of the antiwar movement."

 

One reason for this is the media distortion of who opposes war. Protest is portrayed as a hobby for affluent white college students...a slight detour on the road to Yuppiedom. Not true, says Franklin: "A Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that 60 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75 percent of those with a high school education favored withdrawal, and 80 percent of those with only a grade school education favored withdrawal."

 

Context like this may not be ready for primetime, but retired generals are.

 

When Schechter says, "Hawks rule the TV studios even as doves line the streets," he referring to the growing number of men in uniform embedded on the nightly news-especially during U.S. military interventions. It's difficult to discover much of anything about the peace movement from a corporate media that relies almost entirely on retired military men as wartime commentators. While such veterans may have obvious advantages in discussing military strategy, it's vital to remember that few if any anti-war "experts" are paid by networks and granted a national audience.

 

During the 1999 U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, one of CNN's military analysts, Lt. Gen. Dan Benton, U.S. Army (Ret.), gave us an illustrative example of what the networks are paying for:

 

"I don't know what our countrymen that are questioning why we're involved in this conflict are thinking about. As I listened to this press conference this morning, with reports of rapes, villages being burned, and this particularly incredible report of blood banks, of blood being harvested from young boys for the use of Yugoslav forces, I just got madder and madder. The United States has a responsibility as the only superpower in the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody has got to stand up and say, 'That's enough, stop it, we aren't going to put up with this.'"

 

Such analysis ignores (deliberately or otherwise) the existence of wartime spin.

 

As the bombardment of Yugoslavia continued, Pacifica's Amy Goodman posed this question to CNN's senior vice president for political coverage Frank Sesno: "If you support the practice of putting ex-military men-generals-on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion during a time of war?"

 

"We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area," Sesno replied. "We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that-they're not there as advocates."

 

From January 30, 2003 to February 12, 2003, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) examined such "analysts," the "on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." FAIR found 267 of the 393 on-camera sources were from the U.S. and 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. "Only one of the official U.S. sources-Sen. Edward Kennedy-expressed skepticism or opposition to the war," says FAIR, but the best Kennedy could muster was self-interest masked by vagueness. "Once we get in there, how are we going to get out?" he asked on NBC Nightly News on February 5, 2003...conveniently neglecting any mention of the legality of such an intervention.

 

Consistent with the media military invasion described above, of the 393 sources, 297 were either current or retired officials and only four were skeptics or opponents of war. "Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented," FAIR concluded.

 

Where's "Anarchy, Inc." when you need it?

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

that when us so called lefty radicals were shouting "fascist pig" or similar rhetorical remarks, mostly to agitate these folks, it was quite rhetorical. But Now we have REAL fascism, by all definitions, the hatred of righteous and democratic dissent, the abridgement of rights for so-called security.

 

Even if we were to throw these rascals out in november (dont count on it, because even if anti-bush forces have the votes, REAL FASCISTS do not play the democracy game), it will take a good two decades to undo the calamities these evil folks have wrought on our nation.

 

Butch blames 9-1-1 for everything (even though the destruction of the WTC was the best thing that ever happened to his reign), but he did not defend our nation. He did not provide the firepower requested by the generals to root al qaida out of afghani and paki territories, and then he left them high and dry. He has failed on all fronts, and this description of the butcher as a miserable failure is not lefty mad mahax speakin, this comes from Pat Buchannon, of all people.

 

War Criminal. He should be put in a cell in gitmo bay. He should be with the likes of milosovitch, pol pot, sharon and other completely horrid and unworthy persons that have disgraced this very planet.

 

mad mahax

[AncientMariner]

I have to agree with you on Pat Buchanan. He is the best conservative of them all but after the horror of the Clinton administration I had to take sides with the Republicans(unfortunately the Republicans are too blind to see the gem they have in Buchanan) even though Bush is far from the ideal leader. Personally I am sick of the 1960's mentality of protesting everything under the sun and even making a business out of protesting so these sob stories really don't move me in any way. The way I look at it when some 300lb hamburger chompin karmi gets arrested for protesting the government its Krishna's way of telling him to get a job and quit being such a social disturbance.

[AncientMariner]

No offense but if I was interested in the expert opinion of every psuedo-intellectual liberal college professor I would go back to college but I would never subject myself to such tyranny ever again.