Taser Incident Shows 1st Amendment Oppression

(This was written one week after the tazer incident at the University of Florida)

It's no wonder politicians get away with what they do in this country when the people who ask tough questions get tazered.
For those of you living under a rock that lacks youtube access, last week at the University of Florida, a student who pestered John Kerry with questions had his microphone shut off and was dragged, literally kicking and screaming, toward the exit by police. After briefly breaking away from his captor the student, Andrew Meyer, was pushed to the floor and rendered completely immobile by numerous officers. Despite numerous officers holding him and and his pleading "Don't taze me, bro!" the student was 'tazered,' eliciting frantic shouts of pain from the 21-year-old.
The student asked John Kerry three questions: the first was why he conceded the 2004 election as quickly as he did, the second was why he isn't calling for an impeachment of President Bush, and the third was if he was in the same "secret society" in college as Bush.
All very useful questions despite Meyer's rambling and discontented attitude. Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident, because college students aren't the only ones with honest statements and questions who are, one way or another, cut off, tasered, or hauled out of the room.
Back in January 2003, when the Iraq War was pitched to Congress, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the war would cost "under $50 billion." However, Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economics advisor, estimated the cost at over $100 billion. Lindsey was then fired and his estimate considered "very, very high." The current cost of Iraq is somewhere between $400 billion and $2.2 trillion, depending on who you ask (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1322). The alarming removal might have been more widely known to Americans if the Secret Service had to carry Lindsey out of the White House flailing his arms and yelling like the Florida student.
The now-infamous Joe Wilson got much worse treatment that same year after publishing an article in the New York Times entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which he concluded "that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Eight days later Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as an undercover CIA agent by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Her safety was threatened to make an example of Joe Wilson; to warn others who spoke out against Bush Administration policy.
Just last August Alberto Gonzalez resigned amid hearings with a Senate Judiciary Committee over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys who were all apparently doing their jobs investigating criminal activity. Replacing so many of these influential figures midway through the administration is unprecedented, with only three attorneys forced out similarly since 1981. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/opinion/26mon4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) Gonzalez had no problem with stunning hard-working individuals en masse.
Rumor has it that Meyer is a spectacle-hungry campus prankster, but his charged queries to Kerry are not a reason to cut his mic; they're a reason to turn up the volume. The officials' belief that unforgiving challenges were inappropriate is evidence of a state where politicians are not rightly held to utmost scrutiny. An informed student, ambassador, or attorney has a right, if not a responsibility, to demand -not timidly ask- politicians to explain themselves.
This violent, unnecessary detainment is not only reprehensible when it is against a boisterous student; it is incalculably worse when it is a trend in maiming and silencing political dissension in America. Political discussion should be electrified, but not the discussers.

Videos of the incident:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5307657127017581467&q=Florida+Taser+incident&total=91&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=8
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6325830637005579877&q=Florida+Taser+incident&total=88&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0