First Amendment Anyone?

It seems that if you curse at the acting President who is doing a media circus near your destroyed Louisiana home, you get this treatment:

As they were salvaging a few things from Marble’s home, two military police waving M-16’s showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble’s description who had cursed at Cheney.

“I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so they put me in handcuffs and ‘detained’ me for about 20 minutes or so,” Marble wrote. “My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go.”

So let’s get this straight: A physician with a newborn baby loses most everything he owns in the hurricane, does what most of us WANT to do and “echoes” Cheney’s words he spoke on the Senate floor last year, walks away harmlessly, mission accomplished, and then once the media cameras leave, he is treated like a foreign terrorist as Cheney’s goons waving M-16s handcuff him in front of his destroyed home?

Bottom line: in a really totalitarian country, they lock you up in an asylum for this, drug you, throw away the key. We just handcuff you and try to intimidate you a little. So we’ve still got a way to go. But it’s another little tiny step towards authoritarianism, at least. (“It is
seldom that any freedom is lost all at once.” – Hume)

I can see why the secret service might want to interview anyone who shouts obscenities at someone they have to protect; who knows, maybe the next step is a brick, or worse. That part doesn’t bother me at all. But I don’t get the handcuffs for exercising your First Amendment rights. Not at all.

Related post, sadly prescient: America Needs You, Harry Truman.