ustxtxb_obs_2008_09_19_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

THE ASSAULT ON FREEDOM Molly Ivins’ appreciation of the Bill of Rights. By MOLLY WINS and LOU DUBOSE People should watch what they say. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, October 2001 We were wearing T-shirts, exercising our free-speech rights in the public square. And we were arrested? If you cede this, there’s nothing left. University of Houston law student Jeff Rank, February 2007 li I my 4, 2004. The temperature is in the midnineties, the humidity is high, the crowd on the West Virginia capitol grounds numbers three, or four, or six thousand, depending on the media source. George W. Bush is in a tight race with John Kerry. And a growing number of vot ers have already gone south on Bush’s war in Iraq. After Representative Shelley Moore Capito introduces the president, he thanks her for serving as his state campaign chair. Then takes ten more minutes to make it through the acknowledgments and howdies in his twenty-five-minute speech. He thanks the Boy Scouts. And the Girl Scouts. He thanks Charleston’s Republican mayor, Danny Jones. He thanks country and western singer Aaron Tippin. He thanks the minister of Bible Center megachurch, whose service he missed that morning because of a mechanical problem on Air Force One. He thanks no one in particular for the “coal found in West Virginia.” He thanks the Almighty a few times. He even thanks the West Virginia Coal Association president, whom he describes as “my friend:’ for getting the coal out of the ground and into the nation’s power plants. He doesn’t thank the coal miners, but the president is doubled over with gratitude. The party dignitaries, Bush’s state campaign chair, the planned stop at a big-box evangelical church, the Bush T-shirts worn by enthusiastic supporters, all suggest that the Fourth of July visit to Charleston is a campaign event. It’s not. It’s an official visit of the president of the United States, with taxpayers picking up the tab for Air Force One, the president’s security detail, and the weeks of work by the White House Advance Team. But political strategist Karl Rove is in charge, the Iraq war in question, and John Kerry slightly ahead in national polls. So the president delivers his well-rehearsed keep-fear-alive campaign stem-winder, written to drive home the message he hopes will close the deal in November: The terrorists who were plotting to attack us again are hard on the run in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our immediate task in battlefronts like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere is to capture or kill the terrorists. That’s our immediate task. We made a decision. You see. We 18 THE TEXAS OBSERVER SEPTEMBER 19, 2008 Molly Ivins at The New York Times in 1978. photo courtesy of the Ivins family will engage these enemies in these countries around the world attacks of September the eleventh, 2001, the nation resolved to to them. You can’t negotiate with them. You cannot hope for the best with these people. We must be relentless and determined But it’s the Fourth of July, and just as a good country and western song requires the mention of Momma, trains, trucks, prison, and gettin drunk, there are certain de rigueur requirements of a good Fourth of July speech. Bush touched on most of them: the founders, George Washington \(“I call him and Freedom. On this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds, the freedom of free expression, that’s what we believe. But we also understand that that freedom is not America’s gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty God’s gift to each man and woman in this world. And by serving that ideal, by never forgetting the values and the principles that have made this country so strong 228 years after our country’s founding, we will bring hope to others and Nicole Rank had moved from Bush’s home state to Charleston, West Virginia, to work on a FEMA flood control project. When agency employees were offered tickets to the president’s Fourth of July event, she filled out an online application for herself and her husband, Jeff, who had followed her from their home in Corpus Christi. Neither of them was a George W