In Bush World FREEDOM OF SPEECH DOES NOT EXIST.
"All hail the Dear Leader!" Editorial, News Leader, Shenandoah Valley
We're accustomed to seeing images from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, Kim Jong-il's North Korea and the late Saddam Hussein's Iraq of delirious supporters fawning over their Maximum Leader. There never seems to be a protester in sight — just an unending lovefest of happy, chanting devotees professing their adoration with voices and placards while Big Daddy dandles the babies and gives his blessings to the throngs. Makes you proud to live in America, land of the free, where that sort of thing doesn't happen, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it doesn't — or it hasn't, at least during the reign of George II.
During 2004, when President George W. Bush was running for re-election, it became common practice for the president's political rallies to be orchestrated events, the campaign trail version of gated communities. No one was allowed in without a ticket. Even then, the anointed were often asked to sign "affidavits of support" — loyalty oaths, in other words — before their tickets were issued.
As un-American as all of this is, what is worse has been the revelation that the Bush administration had implemented a manual directing the orchestration of such events.
The "Presidential Advance Manual," dated October 2002 and stamped "Sensitive — Do Not Copy," gave rally organizers explicit instructions about how to ensure only the faithful were to be allowed an audience with the Omnipotent One, even from a distance. It detailed how Republican Brownshirts — excuse us, "rally squads" — were expected to handle the rare occasion when a Disloyal slipped through the filters:
"The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supporting chants to drown out the protestors (USA! USA! USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/(Y)oung (R)epublican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities."
A practical example of how the "rally squads" work can be gleaned from a Sept. 28, 2004 article in The New York Times describing how one protester, 51-year-old Michael Thorne, was handled when he and a few others managed to infiltrate an orchestrated Bush rally in Bangor, Maine:
"Mr. Thorne had yelled 'No more lies!' during Mr. Bush's speech, been quickly surrounded by half a dozen campaign aides heatedly yelling 'Four more years!' and been hustled out of the rally with several others wearing anti-Bush T-shirts by security guards and police officers."
The "rally squad" in action. Disloyalty is not tolerated in the Court of the Crimson King. However, since the state of the First Amendment in the United States has (not quite yet, at any rate) devolved to the level of a banana republic, protesters who cannot infiltrate the Gathering of the Faithful are not jailed or summarily executed. Instead, they are exiled to First Amendment Gulags. The manual directs the advance staff to ask local police "to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."
What can be gleaned from the Presidential Advance Manual are only glimpses into the mindset of the Bush administration and its most loyal followers. Of its more than 100 pages, literally dozens of pages have been redacted. While some of this censored material may have involved items of legitimate security concern, trust levels do not run at their highest level when it is apparent that our national leader views those of us who are not willing to sign loyalty oaths as dispensable and unworthy of sharing space and oxygen with the Maximum Leader.
Red emphasis, mine
As far as this citizen is concerned, this is a violation of our "Maximum Leader's" oath of office. Of course we all could be wrong, maybe that wasn't a Bible he had his hand on.
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