Remember when President Bush derided protesters of the Iraq war, and he asked citizens to start reporting people who said anything “fishy” about the war? Remember when his staff was telling his supporters to “push back twice as hard?” Remember how, after the staff had done so, violence started breaking out between anti-war protesters and the administration’s supporters?

No?

There’s a good reason you don’t remember that. It didn’t happen. If it had, the news media would’ve been all over it like a school of starving piranha.

Replace “President Bush” with “President Obama” and “Iraq War” with “Health Care ‘Reform’”, though, and the story is true. A shouting and shoving match broke out in Tampa. Six people were arrested (for assault and disturbing the peace) in St. Louis, where an angry mob allegedly attacked a black man while at least one member was using a racial slur against him.

I’m sure this isn’t the Administration’s fault. I mean, if Bill O’Reilly criticizes an abortion doctor and the man is killed, that’s clearly his fault, but if the President’s deputy chief of staff tells protesters to “push back,” well, any violence that ensues is the fault of the anti-reform protesters. That might look like a double-standard, but it’s not, because everyone knows that Republicans are the root of all violence.

Look, President Bush did any number of things wrong, and he (and Republican congressmen) were subjected to any number of protests, some of which probably did involve a little bit of violence with counter-protesters (it’s hard to get large groups of people with opposing opinions and high emotions together without having any violence). As far as I know, though, he never denounced the protesters, never encouraged the counter-protests, and certainly never encouraged people to report those who were speaking out against his policies.

Regardless of one’s stance on the proposed health care reforms, I think it’s obvious that the administration (and the Democratic Congress, for that matter) needs to be a little more accepting of opposing viewpoints and accept that protests will happen. I know they probably didn’t face a lot of this for the last eight years, but they could learn a lesson on how to deal with protests from the previous administration.

Simon mentions that sending an e-mail to flag@whitehouse.gov ^[a] will cause your IP address to be added to a “permanent file”. Not to worry, though, he’s found a nice response to that plan (originating from Cuffy Meigs).

The basic gist of the plan is that the more often flag@whitehouse.gov appears in links or in plaintext (flag@whitehouse.gov) on the internet, the more often that spambots will find it and send out the messages. That’s fair, enough, I guess, but I see a more sinister motive for flag@whitehouse.gov. I believe that the idea is not so much to collect the IP addresses of those who e-mail flag@whitehouse.gov, but to collect the e-mail addresses. Once they’ve collected a large number of e-mail addresses that have mailed flag@whitehouse.gov, the administration can then raise money to pay for its health care plan simply by selling contact information of everyone who’s sent a message to flag@whitehouse.gov. I’m not saying that’s definitely the plan, but President Obama has been sucking up to the the current Iranian regime and legally ousted President Zelaya of Honduras pretty heavily; why not go whole hog and get in bed with spammers?

1. In case you aren’t aware, flag@whitehouse.gov is the e-mail address that’s been created to allow citizens to report dissidents “fishy” statements about the health care plan. As if the health care “plan” isn’t fishy enough on its own, what with senators saying that reading it would be impossible, how can they expect us to support it? [↩]