Black Box Report

How Not to Behave*

( * for both the tas-ers and the tas-ee)

Fame-seeking amateur journalist and UF student Andrew Meyers' biggest contribution to our lexicon is likely to be the catchphrase "Don't taze me, bro!" Most writers aspire to be remembered for something more substantial, and likely Meyer himself regrets his entry, as well as the manner of its inspiration. Will Bunch looked at his body of work and is only surprised this didn't happen sooner:

Every piece written by Meyer, mostly intended for the Alligator student newspaper and one or two published in a daily newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel, is an angry diatribe against someone, no matter what the subject matter -- Republicans, his fellow students, Florida quarterback Chris Leak, even a fraternity Dance Marathon for charity.
......
He is a young journalist whose brief career has been devoted writing things to make people really angry and apparently to becoming famous, so we shouldn't be surprised that he provoked an extreme response.

Just to establish, if it wasn't apparent from his writings and the video, Meyer's a bit of an ass.

Reaction from the right was tentatively supportive at first, as it was assumed anyone giving John Kerry a hard time must've been a conservative:

Boy, that security team sure was in a wicked hurry to lay hands on someone disrespecting a Democrat, weren't they?

Meanwhile protesters are allowed to menace and charge conservative speakers at will.

In fairness, he seems to have hogged the mic for a while.

...I sure hope he's not one of ours..., but still, the alacrity with which campus security jumps to protect a Democrats' dignity is surprising. Couldn't they have just turned off the mic and ignored him?

But the timid defenses quickly reversed course when Meyer was found to be to the left of even John Kerry:

Good for the campus police because Meyer deserved what he got...I wish the campus police acted more like these guys when conservatives are speaking at colleges instead of sitting on their thumbs while libs takeover the stage and throw pies.

Because the only thing better than someone getting tasered is a pie-throwing liberal getting tasered. Or anybody, really. Because if you're getting punished, you obviously deserved it. That's the authoritarian way.

But on the other end of the spectrum, Naomi Wolf goes into high dudgeon, fretting about the coming police state:

A very ordinary-looking American student -- Andrew Meyer, 21, at the University of Florida - was tasered by police when he asked a question of Senator John Kerry about the impeachment of President George Bush. His arms were pinned and as he tried to keep speaking he was shocked -- in spite of begging not to be hurt...It is an iconic turning point and it will be remembered as the moment at which America either fought back or yielded...That taser was directed at the body of a young man, but it is we ourselves, and our Constitution, who received the full force of the shock.

(emphasis mine)

Ummm...no. Not really. This isn't Kent State '70. Meyer was acting like an ass, not Gandhi, and resisted arrest. That said, Meyer may not be a free speech hero, but getting hit with 10,000 volts ought to have a higher standard:

That the cops over-reacted is clear from the tape. Sure the kid was a loudmouth jerk but he wasn't incoherent, just abrasive. That's not against the law. He wasn't presenting any threat to the public and Kerry was clearly willing to answer his question. Furthermore, with six freaking cops, there was absolutely no reason to taser the kid. This weapon was originally issued as an alternative to lethal force, not common sense.

But even that's not the most disturbing thing:

What disturbs me is that so many of his peers think this young hotdog’s behavior meets the standard at which they’re comfortable with him being punished. And what does that say about young people today? That no principles are worth making a fool of yourself in public? That dissent must take place within designated zones or you deserve what you get?

"Kids! What's the matter with kids today?"

25% said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” well below the 49% recorded in the 2002 survey that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, but up from 18% in 2006.

Wonder who they voted for?

In a situation where everyone involved acted inappropriately, no one deserves to be thought of as a hero of any kind. But in the event of a tie, the win goes to the loser - figuratively and literally in this case, Meyer:

I think it's fair to say that the kid was being a jerk. I think it's also fair to say that in the United States, there's no law against being a jerk.

Good thing, too. There aren't enough jails in the world if we criminalize being stupid.

Well, at least someone's keeping busy.

What things are important enough to fight for? What basic principles are you willing to go to the mat for, even if you know you're doomed to lose on a technicality?

"No taxation without representation?" Only a rallying cry for the US Revolutionary War and a founding tenet of this country. But giving over a half million citizens of Washington DC that right "came up short in the Senate":

Abraham Lincoln must have rolled over in his grave this morning as Republicans used the threat of a filibuster to kill the legislation passed by the House that would have provided for permanent congressional representation for the 600,000 residents of Washington, DC, who do, it should be noted, pay taxes, and serve in the military and on juries. It's also a majority African-American jurisdiction and that, of course, is why what was once the party of Lincoln...refused to let the bill go forward for a straight up or down vote.

"Support the troops" has been thrown around so many times, it might as well be made of Nerf. So how about protecting troops by keeping them rested enough between tours to maintain peak efficiency? The Webb Amendment "fell short by four votes," But protecting them from the dangers of a newspaper ad?

More U.S. senators voted to condemn a newspaper ad attacking Gen. Petraeus than voted...to lengthen the time off troops get from the frontlines in Iraq, thereby reducing individual soldiers exposure to actual attacks.

Habeas corpus, a basic human right that's been around since the Magna Carta? "Fell short in the Senate":

Let’s be clear and unvarnished...44 of our Senators hate the Constitution and basic civil rights. They do not believe in the fundamental right of due process...

Absolutely unacceptable. With all the horrors that we hear about Hamdan, about suicides, about innocent people rounded up for bounties and left to rot in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it is absolutely immoral that 44 senators feel that entrusting basic civil rights of any person to the Bush administration is the way to go.

Now It's not that any of these bills didn't have clear majority support. They did. But a majority is no longer enough:

The reason the Webb amendment failed even though it got 56 votes was that Senators agreed by unanimous consent that the amendment should have to get 60 votes to pass, even without a filibuster.

But why would anyone agree to allow Republicans, who are already on pace to shatter all previous filibuster records, to stop an amendment this important and this sensible without even lifting a finger? And the question here is not just why anyone would allow it, but why everyone did. A single Senator could have put a stop to this simply by saying, "I object" when the unanimous consent request was made. Just one Senator.

Yet none did...

And so the Webb amendment died quietly yesterday, allowing Republicans to enjoy all the obstructionist benefits of a filibuster, without having to stand up and tell Americans and their fighting men and women in the military exactly what they were doing.

Now, the filibuster is a legitimate tool for a minority party. And no one should begrudge the GOP for using the means at their disposal to effect legislation. But besides getting entirely too carried away with the practice - and then blaming Democrats for being a "do-nothing Congress" - there is the rank hypocrisy involved:

For years, Republicans, with a 55-seat majority, cried like young children if Dems even considered a procedural hurdle. They said voters would punish obstructionists. They said it was borderline unconstitutional. They said to stand in the way of majority rule was to undermine a basic principle of our democratic system.

And wouldn’t you know it, the shameless hypocrites didn’t mean a word of it.

Republicans are obstructing legislation at 3 times the normal rate. But do you hear Democratic leadership going on the Sunday talk shows, sending out press release after press release, yelling from the mountain 'til they're hoarse that the GOP is obstructing what is very popular legislation? The silence is deafening. But what's worse is apparently all these things aren't important enough for Democrats to fight for (but MoveOn.org's NY Times ad And now all Republicans have to do is threaten to filibuster a bill, and Senate Democrats roll over like dog show champs. Digby has a solution:

It's really too bad that we now have a new rule that nothing ever passes the Senate without 60 votes. I'm not sure when this became business as usual, but the media seem to have absorbed it as if it were set forth in the constitution...

The fact that this new 60-vote gambit is purely to protect the president to ever have to veto anything that's popular never comes up. Neither, however, does the the press bother to report this as unusual or that the Republican congress is, in effect, vetoing popular legislation by filibustering everything in sight. In fact, the press is reporting this as if the democrats have failed to move their popular legislation even though they have a majority --- never mentioning that a majority is no longer enough, something that I doubt the public knows.

The Democrats are going to have to force real filibusters. I know that it will disrupt the business of the senate, but there's really no other choice. Look at that chart. The Republicans have successfully halted virtually anything worth doing with these EZ-Filibusters. Forget cloture. Make 'em talk.

Make Republicans explain - in front of cameras and with trascripts going out to every news outlet in the country - why residents of Washington DC don't deserve a voting member of the House of Representatives; why denying proper rest periods to already over-extended troops is a good thing; and why we're so eager to abolish habeas corpus, one of the central freedoms the terrorists supposedly hate us for.

They can take their time.