While our super-serious blogosphere has been debating Sarah Palin’s mothering skills, and mainstream journalists have been standing around in New Orleans wearing their rain ponchos, disappointed that Gustav wasn’t as destructive as Katrina, Glenn Greenwald has written a series of largely ignored posts from St. Paul about the extreme police actions that have been occurring in conjunction with the Republican National Convention.
Few mainstream bloggers or journalists seem to care about this story, and why should they? The stifling of protest and dissent by a quasi-militarized police force in a major American city is not nearly as soap operaish or fun as Palin’s early career as a beauty queen and other trivial matters related to her personal life.
Greenwald describes the scene in Minnesota like so:
St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 — with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured.
Today, Greenwald reports, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was arrested for “conspiracy to riot,” which if you’ve ever seen Goodman in person is just about the most ridiculous accusation you can imagine. I saw her once outside of the Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco; she’s a tiny person, no match for a baton-wielding riot officer in full body armor.
Greenwald has posted a video of her arrest on his blog. Let us hope that the media pays more attention to these police actions and the stifling of legitimate protest. Every time we allow local police, in conjunction with federal authorities, to get away with this sort of action, we make it clear that we find this sort of suppression acceptable. Next time, the suppression of dissent will clamp down even more firmly and wholly on our freedoms and rights.
And if our leadership maintains its neoconservative flavor, should McCain win in November, the “liberal” media that doesn’t cover this sort of suppression now might very well become its target. Let us recall that the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kirstol, a good pal of Senator McCain, now a NYT columnist, thought that the New York Times should be prosecuted for revealing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program. A President McCain, under the guidance of neoconservative intellectual luminaries like Kristol, may well want to prosecute the media for ideological deviancy, justified of course in terms of protecting national security.
Country first, indeed.