Orwellian Irony

This is just disturbing. Three teachers go to a campaign speech by President Bush. They have tickets for the event that they got from the Republican party headquarters; they give the tickets at the front gate and are let in; then they are approached by event security and told that they have to leave because of what their matching shirts say. And what did they say?

Protect Our Civil Liberties

And Orwell wept. This is par for the course for the administration, which has made "free speech zones" a regular part of events attended by the President and required loyalty oaths to let folks into normal campaign events and speeches. And for those of you who think I'm biased against Bush, I will be more than happy to publicize any such instances done by the Kerry campaign and hammer them just as hard. Feel free to send them to me.

Tags

More like this

Like Jason Kuznicki, I didn't watch Bush's speech last night, but read it this morning. One of the charms of reading the speech in text is that you get to laugh knowing that such an inane speech was interrupted by applause approximately 14,873,994 times (the other advantage is that when you read…
Brian Leiter says that if us libertarian-minded bloggers aren't blogging about the ridiculous "free speech zones" at the Democratic National Convention, we ought to resign from the human race. That's a little strong, I'd say, but I certainly agree with him on the absurdity of what is going on. You…
I'm so pissed off about this that I woke up at 2:30 am seething and I had to get up and write this. Just read this and tell me that this doesn't deserve a gold medal in the 100 meter stupid hypocrite freestyle: President George W. Bush plans to seek a court order to force the U.S. Federal Election…
One of the truly valuable voices in the world on military issues belongs to David Hackworth. Hack is one of our most highly decorated military veterans, from his days as an underage merchant marine at the end of World War II through Korea, where he was the youngest captain in the Army, and Vietnam…

Why have the "free speech zones" not been struck down in the courts?

By Matthew Phillips (not verified) on 24 Oct 2004 #permalink

Good question, Matthew. I don't know if there have been any cases make it to court yet. One of the difficulties may well be that each event is a one-time event only, which may cause a standing problem for a court case. Any of the 4000 attorneys who read this page wanna weigh in on that?

I am sure Scalia, Renquist and Thomas would be OK w/ Bush's "free speech" zones. Probably knock down any suit as being moot.

By GeneralZod (not verified) on 24 Oct 2004 #permalink