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September 25, 2007
Why yes, America is great
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University sparked lots of protest and outrage, as one would expect:
Hundreds gathered to protest Ahmadinejad's appearance, incensed that a leader who has publicly denied the Holocaust and called for the destruction of the state of Israel was given a prestigious forum to espouse his beliefs.
Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council, said Columbia should not be giving Ahmadinejad a platform. "All he will do on that stage ... is spew more hatred and more venom out there to the world," she said.
Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia, called the whole forum "misguided."
Meanwhile, President Bush's reaction was non-plussed:
In Washington, President Bush responded that he is “OK” with Columbia inviting Ahmadinejad, which he said just shows the extent of how much America respects freedom of speech. But Bush said he personally would not have invited the Iranian president to the United States to speak.
I can't find the article, but I am pretty sure President Bush used the opportunity to once again say "how great America is" that an enemy of the country can waltz on in and talk about the country. Of course I agree with the President, that it's a very good thing that free speech is alive and well.
Nevertheless, it's still a little curious to hear the President say one thing, and to see his assistants undermining the whole thing:
Late last week, the federal government settled a lawsuit with a pair of Texans who were arrested in 2004 for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a Fourth of July event in Charleston, W.Va. That's right, friends, $80,000 (of your taxpayer dollars) will be paid out to Jeff and Nicole Rank, whose suit against Gregory J. Jenkins—former deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance—has been dismissed.
...
The details of the Rank lawsuit and the cases involving similarly harassed folks are always fascinating: citizens removed from a Bush event in Denver because of an offensive bumper sticker on their car outside ("No More Blood For Oil"); a Tucson student barred from a Bush event for sporting a Young Democrats T-shirt; Wisconsin citizens forced to unbutton their shirts before attending a Bush speech, only to have an attendee wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt ejected from the event. But the best thing to have emerged from the Rank litigation was the official—if heavily redacted—Presidential Advance Manual (dated October 2002), which, although stamped "SENSITIVE" and 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[.]"
entry no. 969
Posted by oz115 at September 25, 2007 12:38 PM
Comments
As long as it isn't free speech that directly criticizes Bush, he's perfectly fine with it. Kind of the same way that he supports states' rights as long as the states pass legislation that he agrees with.
Posted by: Pete at September 25, 2007 02:01 PM