Rad Geek People's Daily

Last week, while stumping for her husband’s re-election campaign, Laura Bush noted that It’s for our country, and our children and our grandchildren that we do the hard work of confronting terror and promoting democracy, and saluted the fighting men and women in Iraq who make that hard work possible. This is standard Bush administration boilerplate, and of course it’s the kind of boilerplate that the conservative audiences at these speeches lap up. But one ticket-holding audience member, Sue Sapir Niederer, had a bit of a different perspective: her son, Army 1^st Lieutenant Seth Dvorin, who was killed in Iraq while trying to disarm a bomb. Ms. Niederer, wearing a t-shirt that read “President Bush, you killed my son”, Ms. Niederer spoke up in the middle of Ms. Bush’s salute to the veterans to ask why her son was sent to die, and Why aren‘t the senators, the legislators, the congressman, our children serving in this war, if this war is a war that they agree with, there are three…

Well, knowing this administration, you can be sure that Ms. Bush and the event staff showed their compassion, their respect for vigorous public debate, and their deep concern for the lives of soldiers and their families. Specifically, they showed it by trying to talk over Ms. Niederer’s questions by continuing the scripted speech, and then by handcuffing a grieving mother, dragging her out of the building, and arresting her, while the crowd tried to drown out her voice by yelling Your son chose to fight in that war and chanting Four more years.