the terrorists have won (part 312)
So I go downtown today to the Kerry rally and find out that my "good tickets" that the volunteer coordinator implied were so good were just middle-tier sor of tickets. The way she was so excited about them and the very short list she had to give such tickets to were waaaaaaaay over-rated. Instead of "meeting" him as she said, I would have been one out of a thousand or so in the immediate vacinity in front of the stage. It was just as well I suppose, becaue I didn't even go in.
The gates openned at 11:00 and that's about the time that I got there. The line for the general admission sort of entry was wrapped around a block, snaking two or three times through a parking lot and I was very happy to hear that my "special ticket" put in me another, much shorter, line (unlike my brother who had only the GA ticket). I found my line to be only about a hundred feet long or so and was pretty happy to get at the end of it...but an hour later I had moved twenty or thirty feet and I left.
Security was absurd. I have been to more political rallies than I can even remmber going back to 1992 when I was a sixteen-year-old grunt on the campaign of King George I and have never come across such crazy, over-thetop security. Hell, the security that was up today made the security at the secnd inauguration of Clinton seem like a short pat-down weapons sort ofcheck to a rock concert. More or less, it was like the special treatment that they give every tenth person at the airport performed on every soul walking through. They were thoroughly searching through everyone's stuff, emptying purses and bags, and then having everyone walk through a magnatometer. All this for a presidential candidate...one guy...in some out f the way town that people outside the US (and even many here) have never even heard of. It was assanine.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there needs to be security. But to the extent that it takes thirty seconds or more to check each of the 20,000 people attending a stump speach? No. They had only 10 lines set up that I could see...that's about twenty people a minute, 1200 an hour. Sure, it would have helped if not every woman had to bring her purse and if the younnger people had not had to bring their backpacks (especially when the tickets explicitly said "please limit the items you bring") but that's still retarded. I can remember a Clinton rally in 1996 (or was it 92?) when people just showed up, and got close and personal. I've been to plenty of events with big important people and not had such invasive security present. Hell, at the Bush rally on Friday, people seemed to zoom right through. That was for a sitting president.
Ugh. I hope that this bullshit was the result of the secret service screwing up and not because the Kerry campaign is fucking paranoid, because if it's the latter I really don't think I can support the guy or even vote for him...because one of the main reasons that I hate Bush so is because he is so facist when it comes to "national security"...not so much as Kerry might be about his personal safety it may seem.
The gates openned at 11:00 and that's about the time that I got there. The line for the general admission sort of entry was wrapped around a block, snaking two or three times through a parking lot and I was very happy to hear that my "special ticket" put in me another, much shorter, line (unlike my brother who had only the GA ticket). I found my line to be only about a hundred feet long or so and was pretty happy to get at the end of it...but an hour later I had moved twenty or thirty feet and I left.
Security was absurd. I have been to more political rallies than I can even remmber going back to 1992 when I was a sixteen-year-old grunt on the campaign of King George I and have never come across such crazy, over-thetop security. Hell, the security that was up today made the security at the secnd inauguration of Clinton seem like a short pat-down weapons sort ofcheck to a rock concert. More or less, it was like the special treatment that they give every tenth person at the airport performed on every soul walking through. They were thoroughly searching through everyone's stuff, emptying purses and bags, and then having everyone walk through a magnatometer. All this for a presidential candidate...one guy...in some out f the way town that people outside the US (and even many here) have never even heard of. It was assanine.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there needs to be security. But to the extent that it takes thirty seconds or more to check each of the 20,000 people attending a stump speach? No. They had only 10 lines set up that I could see...that's about twenty people a minute, 1200 an hour. Sure, it would have helped if not every woman had to bring her purse and if the younnger people had not had to bring their backpacks (especially when the tickets explicitly said "please limit the items you bring") but that's still retarded. I can remember a Clinton rally in 1996 (or was it 92?) when people just showed up, and got close and personal. I've been to plenty of events with big important people and not had such invasive security present. Hell, at the Bush rally on Friday, people seemed to zoom right through. That was for a sitting president.
Ugh. I hope that this bullshit was the result of the secret service screwing up and not because the Kerry campaign is fucking paranoid, because if it's the latter I really don't think I can support the guy or even vote for him...because one of the main reasons that I hate Bush so is because he is so facist when it comes to "national security"...not so much as Kerry might be about his personal safety it may seem.
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