When you figure that..
- anti-Bush bumper stickers could get you a visit from the Secret Service even before the 9/11 attacks
- simply having an anti-Bush poster in your possession could get you a visit from the Secret Service in November 2001,
- having the same name as filmmaker Michael Moore could get you a visit from the Secret Service in 2002, even if you are a retired U.S. naval officer
- wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt could get you arrested in 2004
- having a picture of George W. Bush tacked to your wall with a thumbtack through his head and a thumbs-down next to it could get you a visit from the Secret Service in 2005,
...it's surprising, given the number of people who have made veiled threats against Barack Obama's life or exhorted others to violence against him (yes, Sarah Palin included), that you don't see the Secret Service going after these people.
The latest such incident, as Logan Murphy reports at Crooks and Liars, is that of University of Texas football player Buck Burnette:
A template on facebook.com asks, “What are you doing right now?” An ill-advised response led to Buck Burnette’s expulsion from the University of Texas football team.
What began as a private text-message exchange on Election Night between Burnette and a friend soon became available for anybody with a computer to see.
Burnette, a sophomore offensive lineman from Wimberley, was dismissed from the team Nov. 5 for posting a racially insensitive remark about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page.
“I told (our players) to be careful with Facebook and MySpace,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “Those things are really dangerous.”
A survey taken during Monday’s Big 12 coaches conference call found most of the league’s coaches are concerned about how much information is available on popular social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The major concern: Users can voluntarily provide personal information, and the more popular the athletes, the more contact “with hundreds of people they don’t know,” Iowa State coach Gene Chizik.
“It’s a challenge for coaches, because ultimately we’re responsible,” Chizik said.
In the status update section of his Facebook page, Burnette posted, “All the hunters gather up, we have a (slur) in the White House,” in reference to Obama’s becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency. Burnette said the comment was a text message he received from a friend and that he exercised bad judgment posting it on his page. He later apologized in a written note that was read by Brown during a team meeting.
The Durham student in 2001 was visited simply for possessing "anti-American" (sic) material. Here you have a college football player exhorting people who use guns to go after the new president-elect, and he simply gets kicked off the football team. And no visit from the Seret Service.
I have been very careful over the last four years since I started this blog to make very clear that when I talk about how George W. Bush must go, I mean through the remedy of impeachment and removal from office that is set forth in the Constitution.
It is not illegal to be racist. It is not illegal to call the president-elect a n----r. But when you tell people to gather up their guns and hunt down the president-elect, given the history in this country of what has happened to black men when hunters gather up their guns and go after them, that is where free speech ends.
But the Secret Service, who was willing to visit anyone known to possess anything that could even remotely be construed as a threat to George W. Bush, is curiously cavalier when it comes to this nation's next president.
I wonder why?
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