I’ve had several communications with the Denver Three, who were removed from a Bush event because of an anti-war bumper sticker, about the man who ejected them. In each instance, they remind me that the identity of the thug is important, but the training, direction, and policies behind the problem are even more significant. It’s a good point.
With this in mind, the Denver Post’s Diana Carman, who’s really sunk her teeth into this scandal, noted today that the Secret Service-agent impersonator in Denver seems to get around quite a bit.
He was in Fargo – always a hotbed of dangerous political insurgency in this country – prior to Bush’s Feb. 3 appearance in a Social Security town meeting. There he blackballed more than 40 North Dakotans, placing their names on a list to be denied tickets and excluded from the event because they could not be certified as Kool-Aid-drinking Bushies.
He was in Tucson on March 21 when he refused access to the Social Security town meeting to ticket-holder Steven Gerner, who was found guilty of wearing a University of Arizona Young Democrats T-shirt.
And he was in Portsmouth, N.H., on Feb. 16 when he and another guy dressed to look like a Secret Service agent with a serious weight problem ejected two middle-aged women from a sparsely attended Social Security town meeting there.
Carol Shea-Porter and Susan Mayer had tickets and were admitted to the event staged in an airplane hangar. They even were allowed to stay through the entire show, despite the fact that they sat near the TV cameras and removed their sweaters to reveal red T-shirts that said, “Turn Your Back on Bush.”
But when they left their seats to join the crowd on the floor as the president left the hangar, two burly guys grabbed them and gave them the bum’s rush.
“We were there for the whole event, and they knew darn well that we didn’t disrupt anything,” said Shea-Porter. “We never opened our mouths the whole time.”
Obviously, we’re probably not talking about the same thug repeatedly assailing law-abiding citizens at all of these events. But therein lies the point.
At the Denver event, the Republican thug declined to identify himself. In New Hampshire, when one of the middle-aged women asked the man who grabbed her who he is, he responded, “Never mind who I am.” As in Denver, this thug also wore a dark suit and an earpiece.
I’m not saying there’s some grand conspiracy; I’m suggesting that there’s a policy in place for all presidential events that directs staffers how to deal with those who may disagree with Bush. Part of this policy, apparently, includes a certain, shall we say, “tolerance” for large men pretending to be Secret Service agents, despite laws to the contrary.
I know I’ve been raising a fuss about these controversies for a long while, but I maintain that there’s a lot of potential for this scandal. A top Bush aide has already suggested that an official working for the White House was directly responsible for the staff guidelines that led to this fiasco.
If the White House has an official policy that includes illegal harassment for law-abiding ticket-holders, Scott McClellan will need a better explanation than dismissing these incidents as “political stunts.”