Someone asked me recently if I had a favorite subject to write blog posts about. I told him the truth: Bush’s Bubble is the one I enjoy most. It’s hardly the most important subject, and the president has other policies that are far more dangerous, but there’s just something about a White House that goes to extraordinary lengths to shield the president from someone who might disagree with him that never ceases to amaze me.
Long-time readers have no doubt seen me write about the various anecdotes. There were the Denver residents who were removed from a public event and threatened with arrest because one of them had an anti-war bumper sticker on their car. There were the three Oregon schoolteachers were removed from a Bush event and threatened with arrest for wearing t-shirts that said “Protect Our Civil Liberties.”
But the classic example has to be Nicole and Jeff Rank, who attended a 4th of July event in West Virginia in 2004, at which the president delivered a standard speech. The Ranks wrote t-shirts that were critical of the president, but were hardly profane: they featured a red circle and a diagonal bar covering the word “Bush.” On the back of Jeff’s shirt, it said, “Regime change starts at home.” On the back of Nicole’s, it said “Love America, Hate Bush.”
Mid-way through the speech, the president reminded the audience, “On this 4th of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds.” Right about the same time, the White House event staff approached the Ranks and asked them to remove their shirts. They declined — and were promptly arrested, taken into custody in handcuffs.
They hadn’t disrupted the event; they carried no placards; they did not disturb the peace. But because they had shirts that were critical of the president, White House officials had them arrested, photographed, fingerprinted, and charged with trespassing. They were held in jail for several hours, and Nicole, who worked for FEMA, was temporarily suspended from her job. (The criminal charges were eventually dropped.)
With the help of the ACLU, the Ranks filed a lawsuit, alleging a violation of their rights. Last week, the case was settled out of court — but not before the Ranks and their attorneys obtained a copy of the official White House “Presidential Advance Manual.”
And that’s when the story gets funny.
The document is heavily redacted (presumably because it deals with presidential security), and stamped “SENSITIVE.” It says on the cover, in no uncertain terms, that the manual is not to be “duplicated … replicated … photocopied or released to anyone outside of the Executive Office of the President, White House Military Office or United States Secret Service.”
But, because the ACLU is filled with fun-loving folks, the Ranks’ lawyers went ahead and published the whole thing online (.pdf). There’s enough in there for a handful of fun posts, but I’ll try to restrain myself to the biggest revelations.
A fair amount of the manual seems obsessed with the media and what reporters/cameramen will see at a presidential event. For example, the only people who are supposed to be seated between the stage and the camera platform are those identified as “extremely supportive of the administration” (emphasis in the original). The fear, obviously, is that a camera might show a television audience someone who (gasp!) doesn’t agree with the president.
And what about those who might sneak through? The manual encourages White House event staff to find “rally squads” composed of “college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities” to keep dissenters hidden from the view of cameras.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, however, picked up on the best part of all.
The Advance Manual’s finest moments come in its urgent, earnest drive to protect not just the television cameras but also the president himself from the ugliness of the dread “demonstrators.” Certainly, “if it is determined that the media will not see or hear” demonstrators, event staff can ignore them. But event staff must involve themselves in “designating a protest area preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.” In other words, all this suppression of dissent isn’t just to create a puppet show for the cameras. It’s also about sock puppets for the president, who — if he could just be shielded from the mean T-shirts — might still believe his approval ratings soar into the mid-90s. The Ranks’ peaceful protest at the West Virginia state capitol somehow became an act of “trespassing” only because the president was there.
It’s disturbing enough to learn from the Advance Manual that the White House has adopted an official policy of shouting down or covering up dissenting viewpoints with large sheets in order to deceive Americans at home into believing the president is universally adored. But that this official policy also exists to protect the tender sensitivities of the president himself is beyond belief.
George W. Bush is certainly entitled to choose his White House advisers, attorneys general, counselors, friends, and pets based solely on the their inability to tell him no. The rest of us have increasingly come to question the wisdom of such insularity. We just can’t do it in his presence.
Amazing.