Just a gentle reminder that it’s not just the Secret Service and the Bushies who pull this sort of crap:
Protesters at this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Boston may be confined to a cozy triangle of land off Haymarket Square, blocked off from the FleetCenter and convention delegates by a maze of Central Artery service roads, MBTA train tracks, and a temporary parking lot holding scores of buses and media trucks.
Under a preliminary plan floated by convention organizers, the “free-speech zone” would be a small plot bounded by Green Line tracks and North Washington Street, in an area that until recently was given over to the elevated artery. The zone would hold as few as 400 of the several thousand protesters who are expected in Boston in late July.
[…] The disappointment in the preliminary plans is likely to be the start of a protracted battle that has the potential to end up in court, as did a similar dispute at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. Relegated to a parking lot blocks from the convention arena, protesters sued, and less than a month before that convention began, a federal judge ruled that the designated area was unconstitutional. Organizers were forced to move the area to a parking lot directly across the street from an arena entrance, in keeping with earlier federal court rulings that any legal demonstration be allowed within “sight and sound” of its intended audience.
(via InstaPundit)
Deplorable on both sides, if you ask me. Bush does it far more, however — every appearance, actually.
And the same thing was going on during the Clinton era, too, and whomever is in next will probably be doing it as well, I suspect, unless the courts are able to crack down more on it.
Except Clinton didn’t do it to not have to look at protestors; he often waded into crowds, you’ll recall.