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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Can the Secret Service be relied on to protect Barack Obama?
Posted by Jill | 7:29 PM
I wonder.

When you figure that..


...it's surprising, given the number of people who have made veiled threats against Barack Obama's life or exhorted others to violence against him (yes, Sarah Palin included), that you don't see the Secret Service going after these people.

The latest such incident, as Logan Murphy reports at Crooks and Liars, is that of University of Texas football player Buck Burnette:
A template on facebook.com asks, “What are you doing right now?” An ill-advised response led to Buck Burnette’s expulsion from the University of Texas football team.

What began as a private text-message exchange on Election Night between Burnette and a friend soon became available for anybody with a computer to see.

Burnette, a sophomore offensive lineman from Wimberley, was dismissed from the team Nov. 5 for posting a racially insensitive remark about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page.

“I told (our players) to be careful with Facebook and MySpace,” Texas coach Mack Brown said. “Those things are really dangerous.”

A survey taken during Monday’s Big 12 coaches conference call found most of the league’s coaches are concerned about how much information is available on popular social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The major concern: Users can voluntarily provide personal information, and the more popular the athletes, the more contact “with hundreds of people they don’t know,” Iowa State coach Gene Chizik.

“It’s a challenge for coaches, because ultimately we’re responsible,” Chizik said.

In the status update section of his Facebook page, Burnette posted, “All the hunters gather up, we have a (slur) in the White House,” in reference to Obama’s becoming the first African-American elected to the presidency. Burnette said the comment was a text message he received from a friend and that he exercised bad judgment posting it on his page. He later apologized in a written note that was read by Brown during a team meeting.


The Durham student in 2001 was visited simply for possessing "anti-American" (sic) material. Here you have a college football player exhorting people who use guns to go after the new president-elect, and he simply gets kicked off the football team. And no visit from the Seret Service.

I have been very careful over the last four years since I started this blog to make very clear that when I talk about how George W. Bush must go, I mean through the remedy of impeachment and removal from office that is set forth in the Constitution.

It is not illegal to be racist. It is not illegal to call the president-elect a n----r. But when you tell people to gather up their guns and hunt down the president-elect, given the history in this country of what has happened to black men when hunters gather up their guns and go after them, that is where free speech ends.

But the Secret Service, who was willing to visit anyone known to possess anything that could even remotely be construed as a threat to George W. Bush, is curiously cavalier when it comes to this nation's next president.

I wonder why?

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Blogger Rhode Island Rules said...
As a photographer when I bored of seeing the same campaign photos again and again I started to zero in on the secret service agents in the photos. I looked at their demeanor and reactions and their attentiveness. What I found was reassuring when President Obama (oh how nice to say that) is involved. Word has it that the Obama family has invited their agents in to their house in Chicago and he has included them in this pick up basketball games and they have really become a part of the family. The photos show that. There is one agent who seems to be primary and he is always looking pleased and happy to be of service. Another recent set of photos of Obama taking his daughters to school the morning after the election tells all. Malia is giving Dad a kiss and the secret service agent cannot suppress a grin.
I feel comfortable that the agents that have been assigned are totally in his corner and in a larger view on the side of our country.
11/15/08, 9:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Rhode Island is right. My son met a number of the campaign staffers and the Secret Service agents assigned to Senator Obama during the visit to Asheville. The agents love Obama and his family and ask to be assigned to protect them. He treats them like brothers and they are absolutely intent on protecting him.

Their integrity is not a worry.
11/15/08, 9:46 PM  
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