Police Officer Arrested, for Bush Hating
 

I can see the reasoning here.....as this is a man expected to protect the people, not threaten them. It would be interesting to find out the details, as to the depth of seriousness involved, or if he just hates the guy.

Tampa Police officer threatens to kill President Bush



By:Bill McGinty


Tampa, Florida - Tampa police officer Joseph Mazagwu has been arrested and charged with threatening to kill President George Bush when the President was here in July.

STEVE HOGUE, Tampa Police Chief:
“He apparently went in to a local business and made these comments. It was reported to another police officer and we called the Secret Service at once.”

In Federal Court today, the U.S. Atty.’s office quoted Mazagwu’s conversation with a dry cleaning employee on July 15th. Mazagwu allegedly said he wanted nothing to do with protecting the President and went on to criticize the President’s policies in both Iraq and Africa. The conversation ended with Mazagwu allegedly saying that both the President and his father, former President Bush, should be shot.

He reportedly went on to say that if he had enough bullets, he’d shoot the President in the head himself.

STEVE HOGUE:
“When we became aware of the charges, we took his gun and badge immediately.”

Mazagwu has no prior criminal record and served in the Army from 1991 to 2002 when he was discharged with honor. We told Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the President’s brother, about the arrest today.

GOVERNOR JEB BUSH, Florida:
“I don’t have much to say other than that this person must be mentally disturbed to say something like that. I know it’s not indicative of the Tampa Police Department because they are a great group of people.”

STEVE HOGUE:
“I am highly disappointed in this officer for saying this and I want to let people know it will not be tolerated.”

If convicted of this crime, Mazagwu could face up to five years in prison and would never be allowed to own of have a gun again.

http://www.tampabays10.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=9734


Guess I must be mentally disturbed as well....as some of my thoughts have been less than kind concerning Mr Bush as of late.

Case of stupidity meets hyperbole. I understand the depth of feeling that would prompt him to say such a thing, but only if he didn't really mean it. One way or the other, though, it's a crime, and he really can't be walking around again until after the election or working in law enforcement again. I feel sorry for him, but it doesn't matter how much the president sucks, how much damage he does, or how weak his legitimacy is, he's still the president (for all legal purposes) and you simply cannot threaten him without grave consequences.

Yeah, but what did the dry cleaner sya to him.

Hate stories like this because you only hear one side. I have met people and started talking and one thing leads to another and we get passionate and say things in a joking manner. That could be what happened here and someone overheard or mistook what was said. Who knows?

I still believe it's a free speech country and this officer can say whatever he wants. Now if he followed through or made plans to, then there is a problem but just for saying something idiotic is no reason to be arrested in this country.... well, wasn't a reason before Bush was elected and set up Homeland Security.

*Thanks the Gods for inner dialog*

Police Officers are a lot like the Military, they voluntarily give up sections of their freedom of speech. Granted it is stressed less than in the Military they are not allowed to say anything regarding policy that is not pre-approved.

This guy was stupid, couldnt keep his head on his shoulders. I dont think he should be pressed with charges but definately think he deserves to lose his job.

Anyone can get in trouble for saying stuff like this. Freedom of speech is denied when it comes to talking about killing the president. I understand the need for this but at the same time i'm not sure if I agree with it. In todays socieity sarcasm is so common and lines like "he should be shot" are a common expression of dislike for someone but doesn't really mean you want to kill him.

This story is missing the context in which the officer said this but it doesn't matter to the secret service.

He shouldn't have been fired. Temporarily suspended because he as a govt. job AT MOST (I'm thinking reprimand), but completely fired? Haha, no.

The whole "people can't say 'kill the president'" is a myth.

Watch:

[removed, because, with my luck, someone would actually report this only to have the jackoff authorities take it seriously.. so i'll consider myself wrong on this one]

Freedom of speech isn't denied when it comes to the president. It's the equivalent of saying to someone, "I'm going to kill you". We've all said it before at some point, so does that mean we should lose our jobs? Nope! People just have a tendency to turn on their "stupidity" mode where they can't discern actual threat from figure of speech. If the cop had a gun in his hand and was around the GOP convention, then yes, arrest him as he'd probably be quite serious...

This is just ridiculous politics and is nothing more than his peers/boss being Republican.. that and the Gov. is Bush, so Florida essentially = Bush. A police officer saying this in, say, Detroit wouldn't be arrested, but a cop saying this in Texas would. Get the pattern?

This reminds me of Meet the Parents: "you can't say bomb on an airplane!" "bomb bomb bomb. bombbombbombbomb". Same thing ;)

Once again another example of how our first amendment rights have gone down the drain. Just because you say you are going to kill the president doesnt mean that you will actually follow through with it. I mean lots of students at my school have said how they would love to shoot GWB. All that realy needed to be done is have his superiors place him on an assighnment that is not near the president.

Hey come to Britian - lots of people here say they would like to kill Bush !

I say this shit all the time to my wife, but then she reminds me that Cheney would be at the helm *shudder*

Obviously the cop was talking out his ass, who would think that he didn't have enough bullets? Saying I'd kill him myself if I had enough bullets when you're likely holding a gun with enough bullets in it should be evidence enough that he was being sarcastic and just talking shit.

Ummm, threatening to kill the President is illegal. It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of speech.

The Secret Service has absolutely no wiggle room to be nice or brush something off. Someone in the town heard this, thought he could just possibly be serious and called up the Secret Service. They did their job, as they always have. This is nothing new. This has happened under Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Bush Sr., etc. etc.

You can protest all you want. You can walk out in public and yell at the top of your lungs,"GEORGE W. BUSH IS A HORRIBLE PRESIDENT AND PERSON! HE SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE IMMEDIATELY!" 100% acceptable. If you walk out in public and yell "I'M GOING TO KILL GEORGE W. BUSH FOR KILLING ALL THOSE INNOCENT IRAQI'S!" Then you've crossed the line. And if someone reports you the Secret Service will not fuck around.

Don't believe me? Then by all means try. Then, for comparison's sake, try again under the next president, be it Kerry or whoever.

an officer threatens to kill the President and loses his job? cry me a river.

the President will obviously be campaigning in Florida till November. our public officials place a certain level of trust into law enforcement. this man would have been able to get closer to the President with his police credentials... with a firearm no less! seems like a very reasonable precaution to take.

also, do the people of florida want a man with this type of judgement policing their streets and making life-and-death decisions on their behalf? i say good riddance.

I'll assume that you missed the Howard Stern incident where a caller called in and jokingly said it. They asked him on air to recant the statement, and he refused. A few days later the FBI was at the radio station going through logs and such and picked up this fellow a couple days later.

It's not a myth, as there was even a youngster in high school investigated just recently. (If I could find the newsclippings I would link to them).

If you truly think that it is a myth, if I was to report your comment to the secret service, I'm sure that Halx would get a call regarding your post. If you are willing to bet your freedom on it, I'm willing to place the call.

It's called assault, and yes it is illegal.

I personally don't want a person stupid enough to make that statement to have a gun. I cannot believe that in his police training he was not briefed on the consequences of threatening the president. So IMO, he is too stupid to be in law enforcement and there is always barber school.

Stompy,
I urge you to google. You are wrong.

Short of investigating me, what could they do? Probably not much. If they could fine/jail me, then that's a violation of freedom of speech UNLESS the threat was a serious one. They have to take into consideration context of how it was said.

Since I made it in this thread to prove a point, probably not much will happen. If I jokingly said to a friend "Yeah, I wish I could kill the president", not much would happen. They probably investigated the Stern caller because it was made to an audience of millions of people.

What ended up happening to him?

But yeah..

1. I have no criminal record

2. I don't own any weapons, nor do I have access to bombs

3. Does the President even eat Trix? He seems more like an Alphabits type of guy.

4. I could be referring to the president of something else.

Search on google for that phrase or a variation thereof. Have they, or will they, investigate all those people?

There's just so much to take into consideration that it just seems like such a lost cause. If they wanna investigate me, then happy hunting for them. They'll just end up with another dead end lead in their endless pursuit to protect the president from verbal figures of speech. It's utterly ridiculous that that man is protected against saying that, and I don't agree with it.

Why isn't everyone else protected from it? I guess from now on I'll start calling the FBI on everyone who tells me "I'm gonna kill you", jokingly or not and they better investigate just like they would for the president.

Back to the police officer... people say this stuff ALL the time, and if anyone is anal enough to take it literally, then they're retarded... unless, of course, they actually believed he was capable of it.

[edit]
And how is it assault? Assault is a physical or verbal act of violence directly to another person. Was the president there with him when he said it? I HIGHLY doubt any judge will find this man guilty of assault because he joked around w/ another person about shooting the president.

And no, I won't test you on it because if, for some strange reason, they actually do investigate me, I don't wanna have to pay any fines or whatever. Instead, I'll just continue my belief in the fact that we no longer truly have freedom of speech :)

Stompy.... here's the last bit on this...like I said, if you'd like to prove your point as right, I'll make the phone call and we'll see who's sitting at home and who's not.

I couldn't find the Howard Stern one, but this should suffice.

take note in this snippet from the article:

Under federal law, making a threat against the president's life is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

http://www.globalexchange.org/countr...cracy/821.html

after that... there's discussion about about a Rage Against the Machine board that was shut down because a member posted something like what you said. Because Google indexes our threads I'm going to ask you kindly to remove those words and replace them with something less inflammatory.

and if you don't think it's illegal to "threaten someone with bodily harm" I suggest you learn a bit more about the legal world because it happens every day to normal everyday people, mothers, brothers, sisters, and other community members.

Hahaha, sorry.. I don't mean to laugh, but I knew someone would use that at some point.

I think it's illegal to threaten someone only if you're serious! If I'm standing in front of you with this angry look on my face saying, "I'm gonna kill you".. it's a bit different if you play a joke on me and I say "I'm gonna kill you!" In the latter context, no, I don't believe it's illegal. You're tellin me you've never done that? :)

Likewise w/ what the cop said... I've had asshole bosses before where I jokingly said to another co-worker "Man, If I ever see him walking down the street, I'd hit him with my car." Doesn't mean I'm a criminal and that I actually made a threat against him.

The context of how it's used should be taken into consideration. If the person issuing the threat has psychotic tendencies and people believed he'd actually act on it, then I could see how it would be illegal, otherwise... it's just silly :)

They were gone looooooong before you made the post and looong before ya highlighted those sections ;)

thanks.. i had to edit my own quote too ;) LOL but it is a very different world that we live in now then when my father arrived on these shores and where my 1 yr old nephew will be growing up from.

While it is sillly, law enforcement no longer has the luxury of not responding. Lawsuits and press about how come they knew about the threat but didn't do anything about it...

heck that's happening with OBL as it is right? people all up in arms as to why didn't someone take what he was saying seriously and 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

Yelling Fire in a crowded theater is considered common sense today. I'm sure in the day it was highly debated as to the freedom of speech.

I have lived overseas and do recognize where my freedoms end and begin. It's very important to know them and to understand the seriousness of them. I understand kidding around, but someone else who is listening may not be so jokingly with you. I have seen people lose jobs over a joke that someone else overhearing took offense to and the wrong way.

How do you propose to turn a law that is black and white into something so subjective? They arent allowed to investigate a person until they determine whether or not he might be serious.... mind you they need to investigate to determine that.

Oh by the way... it has a MUCH bigger impact on the country if our president is killed than just any Joe off the street. No there shouldnt be a difference but that's like saying the average guy doesnt get a bomb shelter so the President shouldnt either.

As I always say, the police enforce the laws; the judges interpret them. Police aren't supposed to try to discern the context, that's the judge's responsibility.

Another thing to remember, the FBI and Secret Service will err on the side of complete safety for the President. Just saying "oh, I was joking" doesn't mean you'd get off the hook.


"1. I have no criminal record" - They would know this and more, but it doesn't mean you're automatically off the hook.

"2. I don't own any weapons, nor do I have access to bombs" - Weapons can be purchased easily, and bombs are very easily made.

"4. I could be referring to the president of something else." - I remember a joke by Randy Gulman (I think that's his name, the tall Jewish guy from Last Comic Standing 2). "In America we have The Pill. You all know what The Pill is. We have a pill that cures polio, that's not The Pill." Whenever you switch to CNN, Fox News, ABC, MSNBC, when they say "The President" who do you think of? Seeing as though almost every American would say "The President of the United States" the FBI and Secret Service would not really care if you meant to say the president of the Toys 'R Us corperation.

When you start threatening the life of the President, your rights can start disappearing very quickly.

Something to consider, nearly every post in this thread is racking up hits for potentially dangerous content in the FBI's Carnivore system.

I just said "FBI" and "Carnivore" in the same post, this thread was probably flagged for review again because of that.

Can you say it in a song/poem?

We all probably have big fat files on the FBI's terror list ;)

This doubleplus good!

Ignorance is Strength!

Freedom Is slavery!

I can't believe the American people are seriously allowing our freedoms to be taken away from us. The first and second ammendment are being trashed daily. With the right to assemble being thrown out the window, and now, the freedom of speech comes next.

The context of the convo is unknown. I hate the media, and I hate this shit.

What rights were thrown out the windows here SATS? This MORON threatened the life of the President of the United States, not cool.

Well, basically, lets start the list.

You can no longer have anti bush demonstrations even somewhat close to President Bush. Peaceful organizers get arrested constantly.

http://www.rcfp.org/news/2004/0218crawfo.html

That's unconstitutional and you know it.

Our freedom of speech is negated constantly, we are slowly having our rights taken away. We can't speak out against the president, and I would really like to see the other side of this. Are threats wrong? Perhaps yes, but no harm was caused, nor did he have any motive, etc.

And, our 2nd ammendment rights are being taken away by the day, but that is a whole different issue in itself.

Fear....is the mind killer

SATS, If you really want to live in the world that you are describing, move to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, where speaking out against leadership gets your ostracized from your friends and co-workers.

I'm tired of people saying that our rights are being eroded. You're speaking freely, you aren't incarcerated for saying what you are saying. You are not being incarcerated for assembling and gathering together with your friends and family. You aren't being incarcerated for an intellectual crimes like Nelson Mandela.

While you're not here in NYC, the bike rider protests were annoying. I didn't walk through the, but some of my good friends did and they said these people were just assholes. Had they just followed traffic laws and moved along with traffic that would have been a peaceful protest. But to CAUSE more traffic, to make it difficult for ambulances to get through traffic (which is already difficult enough) is asinine and NOT peaceful, when you live amongst 8 million people.

:rolleyes:

How do YOU know it was a real threat? How do you know what context it was used in? Were you there?

So you've never ONCE in your life said to anyone that you were gonna kill them, or another person jokingly or not? Are you the type of person to call the cops on your friends if they joke around like that with you? If so, then yeah, I could see how one would be anal about this... but otherwise, c'mon. Use some common sense and stop thinking everything is so black and white.

Of course, we don't know this guy, so there is definitely the possibility he had devised a big plot to actually shoot the president, but chances are he was joking like people normally do.

The only reason the SS was called was because his peers were fans of Bush. That's all. To be honest, what he said wasn't even a threat. He didn't say "I WILL do it." he said "IF"... "If I had enough bullets, I'd shoot him myself". Considering you only need ONE to do the trick, how much is enough? Clearly he was just babbling on and poses no threat. However, I wasn't there, so I don't know. I would LOVE to read everything he said in it's entirety though... because I guarantee you it was just casual "blah blah I hate Bush" talk as opposed to an actual assassination plot.

But... seeing as how we're living in times where people are SO divided that speaking out against Bush could result in things like getting fired, it's not surprising that saying something like this would get totally taken out of context and misconstrued to be something more serious than it is. It's not the fact that this guy made a "threat", it's the fact that people are ridiculously anal and will do anything to get back at those who don't support their country and blindly follow the leader in anything he says does. There are "patriots" out there who seriously believe that if you don't support Bush, you're a traitor/terrorist.

THAT is what people refer to when they talk about rights/free speech getting trampled on, not the fact that someone else can't openly "threaten" someone else. You know this.

Yes, I completely understand the fact that in this day and age people cannot afford to "be idle" when they hear "threats", but does that mean that people should completely dismiss their common sense?

Just like with what I said above before it was edited... was that a threat? No, it was not. Technically, yes IF that was all you read, but if someone took the 2 extra seconds to read what I said BEFORE and AFTER, you could clearly see that it was not. I'm willing to bet any amount of money that had we heard what this guy said before and after, it would turn out the same way.

I'm not completely dismissing the possibility that he was serious.. I'm just saying it's not likely.

Just a comparison between presidents here, people (including Radio talk show hosts, esp. G. Gordon Liddy), said things a helluvalot worse in public about Clinton and what they would have like to have done or what they would have liked to have seen happen to old Bill, and nothing happened to them, people just laughed or agreed.

Just a comparison. Not saying anything else.

The Department of Homeland Security investigated a guy in Connecticut because someone reported that he was standing in line at Starbucks reading a newspaper with a letter to the editor questoining the US' blind support of Israel and that displayed a pro-Arab bias. He was detained for a few days and released, but the fact that an investigtion occured because of the newspaper he was reading is appalling.

Could you please cite a few sources then? Because this guy is talking about ***killing the president*** and I would like to see what is a helluvalot worse than that because I'm thinkin someone must have said something along the lines of, "Boy, I can't wait until Clinton comes into town so I can shoot him with my rifle, fuck his dead corpse, and then piss on his grave."

Rome wasn't built in one day, and they won't take our rights away in a day either. Slowly kill our rights, and the majority will do nothing. Year after year, we get farther away from our base.

SATS the thing that you are missing, is that in this country you have the ability to make a difference. First, by votoing. How if who you vote for if they never get into office? By running yourself.

In other countries like I mentioned you can vote, but you are supposed to vote for the incumbent, and no one ever wins but the incumbents party.

Do you have the source for this. I would be very interested in researching the follow up. This is one of the few things that the ACLU is actually useful for. If this is true, and someone can be detained for so much as one minute, let alone a few days, for reading a non state approved editorial, then we've already gone a lot further down the dark path than I ever would've thought possible.

I couldn't figure out what you guys were referring to by SATS! lol, ok, got it now.

But I don't think you are giving other nations' voting systems or voters the credit they deserve. You seem to have built up this fiction in order to prove to yourself that this is the 'freeest' nation in the world. I think that you are willfully placing blinders on yourself that would make it so that you are unable to recognize critical changes taking place.

When things don't fit people's paradigms, they are usually reinterpreted to fit within it, or thrown out. Only after enough cognative dissonance will the paradigm start to unwind and may shift. Unfortunately, it may be too late before you experience 'enough' dissonance.

I would just encourage you to try and refrain from supporting the fiction of freedom we have in this country (and that isn't to say that we don't have freedom, but that our flavor of freedom is romanticized and embedded in our cultural beliefs that may or may not match with individual experiences) by building caricatures of other nations' flavors or experiences of freedom.

Please tell my uncle who was asked to publish Pro Marcos articles and when refused and shut down the Manila Times was incarcerated for 9 years.

Please tell that to my other uncles who were Senators and then shuffled out as Ferdinand Marcos delared martial law and disbanded the senate and congress.

When I lived in Singapore I paid very close attention to the leadership there. I paid attention to the voting process and how they work their democracy.

When I visited Iceland I sat with members of their Parliament.

If I had more time in England I would have done the same with them.

I'm not creating this picture in my head from reading newspaper clippings here in the US. My opinion is coming from interfacing directly with the people of the countries, and also my own personal experiences there.

I didn't accuse you of building your caricature of all other nations' from newspaper clipppings. I don't doubt that you have personal experiences that lead you to create these fictions. I suspect that your experiences shape your worldview more profoundly than any thing you might have read, which you might otherwise cast (inaccurately) as objective standpoint.

Your anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, you have still created a subjective impression of your world and reinterpret it to yourself as an objective reality. That is, you purport it to be, both to yourself and others, an accurate portrayal of the world as it exists.

If there is such a thing as a universal reality, I would hope that we can both agree there is no possible way for you to tap into it and all the thoughts and intentions of every single actor on this planet. Instead, you are left with the taskof ordering your experiences into categories based on very limited, first-hand experience, supplemented by the experiences of others, which may or may not be filtered through someone willing to point out the obvious--that our experiences are framed and warped by our own biographies and prejudices.

I also should add that I'm not arguing that abrogations of what one might consider freedom do not occur in other nations, which seems to be what your reply took exception to. Unless you connect the dots for me, I have no way of knowing how your uncle being co-erced into providing pro-statist articles translates into a requirement to vote for the incumbant of his nation, let alone at all times in all countries.


My point was that you select those types of things to 'prove' to yourself that such people over 'there' experience freedomlessness and juxtaposition those select experiences with ones over here that 'prove' to you that we experience, on the whole, freedomness--as if there were intrinsic qualities to each flavor of freedom rather than contemplating that 'freeness' is a social construction.

The danger is this might force you to disregard stories of people getting arrested for hanging a banner that read "bush and the truth point in opposite directions' from their hotel balcony. You might disregard it out of hand, but you are most likely to interpret it in such a way that conforms with your worldview.

That is, you might think, well, they were trespassing or being loud or being obnoxious, or even that they don't really have a 'right' to display such banners on 'private' 'property' (I've enclosed quotes around all the socially constructed categories we have created to support our nation's notion of freedom, and believe them to be real in and of themselves). I don't know whether that really happened, only that I heard Tom Hayden say so last night on C-SPAN. I have only eaten lunch with the man one time, and can't say for certain how he frames his experiencs to others or whether he can provide me an accurate portrayal of the events as I would have interpreted them.

But I am willing to engage in questioning the premise that we actively participate in the free-est nation on this planet. And I think other nations would dispute that statement, as well, likely believing many of them live in a free-er nation.

sure we all do that in filtering our experiences with our values and morals.

I don't think we have a freer society... we have a different society than that of others. There are freedoms here that don't exist in other countries as there are freedoms there that don't exist here. I liken it to the differnce from state to state laws, though a very simplistic analogy.

OK, first of all, I apologize because I didn't notice that you limited your comments to "Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia," That was my bad and an honest mistake--I wasn't trying to put words in your mouht.

Second, my comments were about the human condition, in general, but I directed them at you because we were engaging each other. I do exactly what you do in terms of filtering and categorizing, etc. Please don't think that I was excluding myself or any other particular person from escaping cultural blinders.

Third, the really main point I want to get across is to dispute your remark that, in this country, people aren't being arrested for things that ought to be politically acceptable. People are being arrested for 'harmless' or should we say what ought to be considered lawful activism. The point I would also drive home, however, is that our fictionalized notions of freedom make us interpret this as new, when in fact all powerful, effective political speech is dangerous to the established power structures in this nation and has always been supressed. There hasn't, to my knowledge, been a time when effective political speech has been allowed by activists that wasn't happening on the streets outside the purvue and abilities of the authorities to end it; except possibly during the birthing of this nation before we had a solidified power structure--but even then it's possible the rabble rousers weren't really doing much in terms of there subversiveness. I mean, it wasn't like they were throwing off the crown and participating in some sort of populist or communal governance.

It's not acceptable to me on it's face, but the fact is that some people will be arrested and that's acceptable to me.

While I don't think that the protestors that were involved in the Bike Ride through Manhattan on Friday were ALL bad, as one friend who was swarmed by bikers was harassed and annoyed by it.

My boss' upstairs neighbors were arrested and detained for 36 hours.

There are two sides to it, but at least in this country one just has to wait until it's time to vote again and thus some things change bad to good and some good to bad, depending on how you saw it.

You won't find me at protests because large crowds can be stupid all together as one, and then the police single out a few and that's that, which is what happened to my boss' neighbors. Did they do anything wrong, no. But they pay a price for the few that did, as I've read and seen annoyed NY'rs via blogs and regular media.

Also, Cynthetiq, the part where I was quoting Tom Hayden was from a piece on C-SPAN with a panel of activists and experts speaking about activism, civil disobedience, and civil rights. They all expressed dismay at tactics like the one you just listed because it alienated the general population. Hayden's comment was partly in response to their suggestion that the media and administration also uses those instances to frame protesters, in general, as rabble rousers. So when the story does get around that a group of people were arrested for hanging a banner from their balcony, people wonder just what the hell else they were up to--because in this country people don't just get arrested for something like that, right?

Well, that's his point anyway. He argues they are. But I wanted to point out that both you, a non-'activist' (in I think this sense we are using it in) and me, an 'activist' (maybe 'protestor' would get the point across better as I don't really know how active you are in politics), agree that those tactics are annoying and disruptive to the general population and likely counter-productive to their long-term goals. I'm actually contemplating writing a popular piece for the Times that details the scope of the damage to the environment when an activist damages a vehicle of a logging company, for example. Similar concept--but I think we agree on that overall picture.

I stated this before and believe that some other 'conservative' TFPers came to agree that the public discourse really serves as a way to keep the public from coming together on very importance issues and forces them to be at loggerheads with one another. It's really very skillfull and my fear is that, with all the social science, technology, and means of dispensing propoganda, that this current administration and those following it will really be able to manipulate the public sentiment on a far grander scale than times past.