At my office all the staff except for one is voting for Kerry. Bush is going to be aobut a mile down the road tomorrow. So the one girl, I will call her Ann, is going and is very excited. She has a ticket. We were yelling down the hall to each other and she asked me if I was going and I said no because I would not sign the security oath. We had a yelling argument. I thought all the Bush events were carefully chosen people. Did I misunderstand that or did they stop doing it? She says 25,000 people will be there so obviously they can’t check on everyone like that.
I heard (3rd hand) that people whose houses back up to the event location were visited by the Secret Service and told that they are not allowed to go into their backyards or to even look out their back windows.
I hate it when I say something that is not true. Unless I’m trying to be funny.
Sounds like an urban legend to me, but I don’t have any first hand knowledge. Requiring attendees to sign some sort of form wouldn’t be a very good way to win new voters, and isn’t that the purpose of these campaign speeches?
You know, if you’re unsure of whether the signed affirmation of endorsement thing is still being done, it might have been more to the point to say you weren’t planning to attend because you didn’t have a ticket.
And then if she miraculously obtained a ticket for you, you could go wearing your “Kerry/Edwards” T-shirt, and let her see how you were received by the event organizers.
The reports were from a Cheney event. The loyalty oath got so much scorn, not only because it was a loyalty oath, but because whoever wrote it was a moron.
Disregard that “(includes picture of shirt)” which was meant for the 3rd cite. I got distracted, didn’t preview, and I’m a dirty bird (/American Graffiti).
A strawman is an argument concocted for the purpose of addressing it, rather than the argument made. In this case, the argument made was that the hearsay statement from the article, “If you protest, it won’t be me taking you out. It will be a sniper,” constituted a threat from the person allegedly speaking rather than from the alleged sniper. Those are the points I addressed. Therefore, your strawman accusation is mendacious.
A child jumps out in the road, and everyone understands that by doing so, he’s risking his own life, and so we therefore start and end our safety lesson by admonishing the child; of course nobody thinks to question whether trucks should be driving on the road in the first place.
A person at a Bush event wears a snarky anti-Bush button, and everyone understands that if he makes any more noise, he’ll be shot to death, and so we therefore start and end our safety lesson by admonishing the hcild; of course nobody thinks to question whether snipers ought to be firing on protestors in the first place.
As I think has been welld-demonstrated now, the Bush campaign did use loyalty oaths, but someone realized they were a horrible, horrible, horrible idea (not only because they’re unamerican) so they’ve stopped. However, there are still regular reports that the Bush campaign is screening and kicking people out that might not agree with him. Y’know, because dissent is treason.
I’ll be glad when those bastards get sent back to Texas.
Why not sign the oath with an assumed name, and wear a shirt over a Kerry T shirt. During the rally, take off the outer shirt and put on a Kerry button which you hid in your pants pocket. You’ll get booted, but you can make your point.
I had assumed that the hearsay reference was to a Secret Service sniper. I would expect there to be at least half a dozen of them. Today’s protestors are too young to recall the hazards of protesting from Watts in '68 to Kent State in '70, but were I there protesting, I would not trust the judgment of a government gunman to discern some sudden spasmodic gesture on my part from a sudden threatening gesture against the president. When one is crashing the party where POTUS is secured, one ought to be mindful of Newton’s first law.
