WTF Is It Now?!?

'President' seems unable to bear the sight or sound of dissent, Robyn Blumner writes in St. Petersburg Times:

"President Bush seems to think bullying is the only way to deal with dissent. Bush has so much trouble articulating a defense for his own policies, so little capacity to formulate a reasoned response, that he resorts to shibboleths, name-calling or worse, using authorities to shut down his critics. [...]

"In town after town where Bush has come to raise money or make a speech, his venue and the route leading up to it have been purged of protesters. This is accomplished through the combined efforts of local policing agencies and the secret service, which scour the crowd for any hint of opposition. Anyone with an anti-Bush sign is relegated into what is euphemistically called a Free Speech or Demonstration Zone -- a swath of land usually off the main thoroughfare and chained off so as to make it virtually impossible for the targets of the protest to read the signs or hear the chants. Those with pro-Bush signs are often treated very differently. They are free to cheerlead the president as he rides toward his engagement, which typically is further sanitized by being invitation-only.

"This kind of censorship is indicative of a leader who lacks confidence in his own powers of persuasion and the legitimacy of his course. Why else would Bush be so interested in hiding evidence of dissent within the American populace? [...]

Peter Buckley, a 45-year-old Democratic candidate for Congress in Oregon, was part of a group of people who had turned out to protest Bush's economic policies. They were herded into a dirt compound surrounded by a six-foot cyclone fence, 200 yards from the arena where Bush spoke to 5,000 invited guests.

""We were not allowed anywhere near any kind of position where the president, or the media which follows him, would see or hear us," he wrote. "What is happening everywhere Mr. Bush goes is wrong. The effort being made to hide political opposition in this country is more than cowardly. It's un-American."

"In Tampa, three people, including two grandmothers, were arrested last year at a Bush rally when they held up opposition signs outside the far-flung demonstration zone. Once again, people with supportive signs went unmolested. The charges against the three were later dropped as baseless, and a civil rights suit is expected to be filed within weeks against the Tampa Police Department.

"In the past, courts have ruled protest pens invalid. Americans have a right to address grievances to their president when he appears in public, even if that ruins a particular "photo op." My advice to Bush is to thicken his skin and work on the sagacity of his arguments."