The “do-not-admit list” from President Bush’s 2005 Fargo visit is mentioned in a federal lawsuit against a former top White House official.
The American Civil Liberties Union charges that White House policy illegally silences Americans who are critical of Bush, citing the Fargo visit as part of a pattern.
The names of 42 Fargo area people, including City Commissioner Linda Coates, discovered their names on a list of individuals banned from getting tickets to Bush’s town hall talk on Social Security.
The ACLU says a “Presidential Advance Manual” aims to keep people who are critical of Bush away from him and the news media.
“This is a nationwide problem, not a couple of isolated incidents,” ACLU attorney Chris Hansen said Monday.
The real nationwide problem is not President Bush’s advance teams blocking troublemakers from his speaking events, but rather the tendency of thuggish leftists deranged by their hatred for the President behaving like children in public and disrupting his speaking events. From Code Pink heckling the President at his inauguration to Michael Moore mocking the President with hand gestures at the Republican National Convention, the left has soared to new heights in the arena of public jackassery. Time and again congressional hearings are interrupted by shrieking protesters, politicians are accosted by disaffected malcontents bent on making their political points by screaming them as their dragged off by police.
That sort of thing is not free speech. That’s stupidity, and it has no place in the political arena.
And it’s exactly that sort of thing which led to the Fargo “do not admit” list. Thirty five of the people on that list were members of the Fargo chapter of a far-left group called Democracy for America. These people were actively planning to disrupt the President’s speech in Fargo with some sort of “protest” (undoubtedly a childish display of rowdiness like that which I’ve already described). They spoke of this plan openly on their internet form. Someone from Bush’s advance team must have found out about it (Fargo’s political community is pretty small) and acted to nip it in the bud before it became a problem.
The morons who weren’t admitted have been held up ever since as some sort of free speech martyrs, but in reality they were the victims of their own stupidity. Protests and demonstrations are one thing, but interrupting others as they try to exercise their free speech rights isn’t free speech at all. That’s thuggish behavior, and it certainly doesn’t enjoy any sort of constitutional protections.