{"id":3881,"date":"2005-04-01T11:31:25","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T16:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3881.html"},"modified":"2005-04-01T11:31:25","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T16:31:25","slug":"the-denver-three-day-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-denver-three-day-four\/","title":{"rendered":"The Denver Three — Day Four"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alex Young, Karen Bauer, and Leslie Weise, the three Denver residents who were removed from a Bush event because of a bumper sticker<\/a>, received their free tickets from Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.). Yesterday, the congressman started distancing himself from Bush’s mess.<\/p>\n

Indeed, to hear Beauprez tell it, this fiasco is the White House’s, and only<\/i> the White House’s, fault<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rep. Bob Beauprez said Thursday in a radio show interview that he didn’t have anything to do with the expulsion of three Denver people from a town hall by the President on Social Security. He told AP his office did not “purify” or “homogenize” the audience. <\/p>\n

“This is a very independent thing from any of our offices whether it is the governor’s office or one of our congressional offices or a senatorial office,” Rep. Bob Beauprez, R-Colo., said on KHOW-AM. “The White House does the deal. They literally come in and take over.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s worth noting that Beauprez is planning a gubernatorial campaign next year; the last thing he wants is to get wrapped up in a debacle in which his own constituents are getting mistreated at a public event by the president’s staff.<\/p>\n

Josh Marshall heard the interview and said<\/a>, “[W]hile Beauprez certainly didn’t dump on the president, he didn’t seem overly-impressed by the claim that the unnamed event official in question was just some local Republican that the White House had no connection with.”<\/p>\n

If Beauprez raises any kind of fuss in supporting the Denver Three, it will no doubt help keep the pressure on the White House to give a credible, serious response to this situation. And, as Josh noted<\/a>, it will also reemphasize the need for answers about who, exactly, was responsible for evicting these three law-abiding citizens.
\n
\nAnd speaking of answers, E. J. Dionne has picked up on the controversy and explained some details<\/a> about why the Denver Three believed the GOP thug was a Secret Service agent.<\/p>\n

Before the three could enter, they were stopped and directed toward “a man wearing a smiley-face tie,” Bauer says. The man in the tie told them that the Secret Service was coming to see them. Someone “in a suit wearing an earpiece and a lapel pin” came along to say that “we had been ID’d” and “that if we had any ill intentions, we would be arrested and jailed.” They were initially seated, she said, but the organizers had second thoughts and escorted them out.<\/p>\n

According to the Secret Service, the man they spoke with was not a government agent but a local Republican volunteer. It appears they were “ID’d” by a bumper sticker on their car that read: “No More Blood for Oil.” So don’t dare display a controversial bumper sticker if you want to hear your president. The Republican Party is watching you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’re told the Secret Service is coming to talk to you, and a suddenly a man in a suit with an earpiece shows up to escort you from a building, it’s not a stretch for you to assume this is a Secret Service agent.<\/p>\n

Indeed, that was probably the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Young, Karen Bauer, and Leslie Weise, the three Denver residents who were removed from a Bush event because of a bumper sticker, received their free tickets from Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-Colo.). Yesterday, the congressman started distancing himself from Bush’s mess. Indeed, to hear Beauprez tell it, this fiasco is the White House’s, and only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}