December 16, 2007 6:54 AM

Another DUMB@$$ AWARD wiener

Portland Grandmothers Acquitted of 9/11 Attacks! Peaceful Protesters Not Guilty Despite Comparison to Mohammed Atta.

Protester ‘grannies’ found not guilty: Iraq war - A prosecutor likens five silver-haired activists to the Sept. 11 terrorists; a jury disagrees (Thanks to my intrepid compadre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, for this one….)

DUMB@$$ AWARD wiener #704: Seth Steward

The silver-haired protesters who showed up weekly outside the Northeast Portland military recruiting center last spring typically sat in rocking chairs, holding anti-war signs. But on Good Friday, half a dozen members of the local group calling itself the Seriously P.O.’d Grannies tried something more radical. Members used red finger paint to leave handprints on a front window, along with the number 3,627 — the body count of U.S. service members killed in Iraq to that point. On Thursday, after a three-day trial in which the prosecutor likened them to terrorists, five “Grannies” — actually, four women and a man, ages 56 to 76 — were acquitted on misdemeanor criminal mischief charges….

Sometimes I have to wonder if peope like Seth Steward don’t think that 9.11 is the best thing ever to happen to them. What better way to support their authoritarian, lockstep Conservatism than to be able to beat the drums of 9.11 and the war on terror? After all, how are we supposed to defeat terrorism if people are free to do and say what they choose? What saddens me is that people like Steward are hardly the exception to the rule in the aftermath of 9.11. There are far too many people like him who are willing to sacrifice our (Constitutionally-guaranteed) right to free speech and expression in the name of defeating terrorism and ensuring that authoritarian, Right-wing fearmongers wield the levers of political power. OK, so perhaps the “grannies” were a bit over the top, but since when is that sort of free speech and expression a threat to Our Way of Life © ?

Little angers me more these days than being subjected to the rants of people like Steward, a DUMB@$$ with the intellectual candlepower and the moral sensibilities of a box of hammers. The sort of hyperbole Steward employed in his closing argument should offend every decent American, regardless of what side of the political fence you happen to come down on. Equating five politically active senior citizens with the terrorists responsible for the 9.11 attacks is irresponisble, gratuitously offensive- and yet in the case of our latest DUMB@$$, oddly appropriate. When you give yourself the intellectual license to compare politically active senior citizens with radical Islamic mass murderers, you really have left the realm of the sublime and entered the domain of the DUMB@$$, haven’t you?

The Grannies, it turns out, are part of the most recent surge in the Iraq war: sidewalk sit-ins, face-to-face debates and, in a growing number of cases across the country, all-American grandmotherhood protesting against military recruiters.

The tactic can make life difficult for recruiters, but it’s no picnic for police or prosecutors, either. Who, after all, wants to handcuff Grandma or argue a case against her to a jury?

Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Seth Steward didn’t seem to have trouble this week. In closing arguments Wednesday, he called on the six-member jury to bring back a guilty verdict to “protect our troops.”

He warned jurors to “think of some evils that could happen and why it is important for the line to be drawn here. On Sept. 11, some people drove planes into a building to prove a point. The defendants say their conduct is necessary to avoid imminent danger because people are dying in Iraq. That is the same thing suicide bombers say.”

I don’t care if Steward sees terrorists in his coffee grounds. I don’t care if he views those who disagree with him as evil sleeper cells sworn to wait for just the right moment to destroy Our Way of Life © . As a public servant sworn to uphold and defend the rule of law, Steward should know better than to engage in ideological warfare on the public dime. If Steward chooses to wage war against those whose views he abhors on his time and his own dime, that’s his choice. After all, we still live in a (nominally, at least) free country. I’m sickened that a public servants feels he has the perfect right to use the power of the rule of law to oppress innocent tax-paying Americans simply because he abhors their views and the method of protest.

The “terror grannies” were simply exercising their right to free speech- a right guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution. Did they have the right to engage in defacing private property? Eh, perhaps not. Did what they do rise to the level of a crime against the state, worthy of the type of hateful, inflammatory rhetoric employed by Seth Steward? Uh, not exactly.

When last I checked, Multnomah County had a huge methamphetamine problem, which has spawned a corresponding crime problem. You’d think that Steward would be focusing his efforts and his cheap, overheated rhetoric on solving a real problem…like the meth empidemic, f’rinstance. Then again, when you’re a DUMB@$$, you’re not bound by conventional rules of simple decency. You also apparently don’t need a grip on reality.

Your tax dollars at work…or apparently not….

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on December 16, 2007 6:54 AM.

Freedom? You can't have freedom AND win the war on terror.... was the previous entry in this blog.

I think the polite thing to do would be to wait until he's finished and then give him a cigarette is the next entry in this blog.

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