“I AM MAD AS HELL AND I AM NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!”
-Howard Beale
If you have not seen this yet, you should.
Every American should see this.
I was so pissed off I felt physically ill while watching it.
Then I felt worse as I watched the public reaction to what I thought was an obvious and disgusting violation of a young citizen’s right to free speech and to redress his grievances with his government.
At the University of Florida, a 21-year-old student, Andrew Meyer, was tasered into silence for asking John Kerry controversial questions at a public forum.
Let me get this straight.
It is a public forum, at a public university, specifically for the purpose of letting the public ask questions of an elected public official.
Yes, the kid is acting like a bit of a jerk while he is asking his questions, but being a jerk is not a crime in itself.
If it were, Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck would have been tased into silence long ago and Ann Coulter would be court-ordered to wear a shock collar around her neck 24/7… and Barbara Streisand would get to keep the remote. …But I digress.
You can see at the beginning of the video that everyone is just standing around calmly while John Kerry is speaking. There is no disturbance or commotion and everyone is focused on John Kerry. He finishes speaking, looks up, points directly at this kid and says, "You have a question?” giving this kid the floor.
The kid launches into his piece by presenting the context of his questions, a book, Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast, which lays out the evidence of widespread Republican election fraud in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Senator Kerry states that he has read the book.
Then he asked his questions.
- Why did you concede the 2004 election so quickly? There was ample evidence that something was wrong because the exit polls were so far off from the “official” results that if Senator Kerry has waited and demanded a recount, he may well be President today.
- Why won’t you support impeaching President Bush? Again, there is ample evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors by the entire Bush Administration.
- Were he and George W. Bush both members of the secretive “Skull and Bones Society” at Yale?
His questions are important ones. He obviously did a lot of preparation and thought about his questions. You can see he is very emotional and feels very strongly about what he is saying and asking. Even John Kerry could be heard responding, “Those are important questions.”
The point at which the line was crossed was when the campus police decided to grab the kid and escalate the situation to physical confrontation. Any properly trained police officer knows that in that situation the “fight or flight” instinct will kick in and they always run the risk of the person they are grabbing fighting back reflexively.
