And While We're Talking About Injustice



Brian wrote earlier about the relative lack of outcry in the Jena Six case among the liberal blogosphere, and Teh Portly Dyke has written a lot about how the mainstream media has ignored the story of the Republican U.S. Attorney General who tried to rape a fucking five year old. So since we're on the subject, I'd like to express a little outrage myself.



First, a disclaimer: Andrew Meyer probably didn't deserve to get tasered. The investigation is ongoing, of course, and it's important to remember that we don't have a whole lot of context in which to evaluate what we saw in the Youtube video. Nevertheless, it's pretty apparent that the cops had him outnumbered, and had him on the ground. The tasering bit seems excessive.



But...



(And here's where I start to sound like a bad liberal)



The guy went to the speech looking to get tasered-- or, at the very least, dragged out and arrested. He showed up in this public forum, pushed his way past his classmates to get to the front of the line so he could harass a U.S. Senator with disrespectful, irrelevant questions that he already knew the answers to. He even brought his own video camera, because-- like a lot of people under 25 who don't have two brain cells to rub together-- he's obsessed with being famous. He's grown up with The Real World and other "reality" shows, and has bought into the belief that the most worthwhile thing a person can aspire to is to be on TV. Or, in a pinch, YouTube.



No question, the cops shouldn't have indulged his infantile posturing. And no question, someone probably deserves to be severely reprimanded-- if not suspended or even fired-- over this. But let's not fool ourselves-- this is not the case where a student activist was punished by redneck cops for exercising his right to free speech; this kid actually tried to deny other students their right to ask questions of the Senator, and deny the Senator the right to answer questions posed to him, by yelling and shrieking and acting like the self-centered little nitwit he is. The cops may have overstepped their bounds, but that doesn't mean that Andrew Meyer was right.



Anyway, if you Google the phrase "Andrew Meyer" with the word "taser," you get 236,000 hits. Meanwhile, if you simply Google the name "Lennox Yearwood"-- the African-American minister who had his leg severely injured (possibly broken, depending on which account you read) by Congressional Police Officers merely for wearing a badge that read "I Love the People of Iraq" while standing in line to hear the Petraeus testimony-- you merely get 143,000 hits. Refine the search further to include the word "leg," and you get a paltry 17,900 hits.



Where's the outrage for Lennox Yearwood? Any chance that those who are working overtime to keep the Andrew Meyer story in the news might spend a little time focusing on an even greater abuse of power where someone actually was seriously hurt?