Say Anything Blog

A group of protesters, hoping to talk to Karl Rove about the DREAM Act, stormed his property and beat on the windows of his home.

From the Washington Post:

Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove's Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"

Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, "Get off my property."

"Seems like he doesn't want to invite us in for tea," Emira Palacios quipped to the crowd.

Others chanted, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul."

The crowd then grew more aggressive, fanning around the three accessible sides of Rove's house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read "Say Yes to DREAM" and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.

Shortly thereafter, sirens shot through the neighborhood and Secret Service agents and D.C. police joined the crowd on the lawn. Rove opened his door long enough to talk to an officer, and the crowd serenaded them with a stanza of "America the Beautiful."

The protest was organized by National People's Action, a coalition of neighborhood advocacy groups based in Chicago.

The Constitution in this country protects the citizens' right to peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Storming a man's private residence and pounding on his windows is not my definition of peaceful assemblage.

When a activist group lowers itself to these kind of tactics I lose all respect for whatever cause they're advocating. What's even more disturbing is that the leaders of the protest didn't even seem to think they did anything wrong.

But what the group really wanted was a conversation with Rove, who declined to comment to a reporter through a Secret Service agent.

And after about 30 minutes of goading by protesters in English and Spanish, Rove agreed to meet with two members of the coalition on the condition that the rest of the protesters board their buses and leave his street. The group obliged.

Rove opened his garage door and allowed Palacios and Inez Killingsworth to enter. The meeting lasted two minutes and ended with Rove closing the garage door on Palacios while she was still talking.

Palacios said that Rove was "very upset" and was "yelling in our faces" and that Rove told them "he hoped we were proud to make his 14-year-old and 10-year-old cry."

A White House spokesman said one of the children was a neighbor.

Palacios, trembling and in tears herself, said, "He is very offended because we dared to come here. We dared to come here because he dared to ignore us. I'm sorry we disturbed his children, but our children are disturbed every day.

"He also said, 'Don't ever dare to come back,' " Palacios said. "We will, if he continues to ignore us."

Honestly, if I were Rove, I would have had law enforcement arrest the whole batch of them for trespassing. Just because they think Rove is ignoring their protest does not give them license to move said protest to his front yard. Karl Rove had every right to be angry. They invaded his personal property.

And what kind of a meeting did the leaders of this group really expect to have with Rove, given their tactics? Did they really think he was going to sit down and speak reasonably with them about their cause after they stormed his property and peeked in all the windows of his house?

To be honest, I think Rove showed a fair amount of restraint. Had it been me, I would have pressed trespassing charges against the whole group.