It's always exciting when the trogs fight back, isn't it?

The bottle should not have been thrown, tho.

Gregg Easterbrook had a wonderful column about free speech on 11/5/01, free speech is never free.

Now that's a novel idea, stage an anti-Bush protest march in front of a beer-soaked Nascar crowd. Not to blame the victim, but it gives new meaning to the term 'asking for it'.

The whole point of the exercise is to get some trog to throw that bottle, or do something as equally stupid, which can be repeated ad nauseam as an example of what real Republicans/conservatives are like. As such, this exercise was a resounding success.

Wonder if any of the protesters ever threw a bottle at a WTO meeting?

Raoul:

60% of America was rooting for the bottle thrower.

Raoul, if nobody had thrown a bottle, do you think that the protesters would have gone home with a new appreciation for Republicans/conservatives and told everyone how polite they were?

I am shocked, shocked that someone would call a Commmie swine a Commie swine, or even, (gasp) throw a bottle. There's a war on. Think of what similar aid and comfort to the enemy would have elicited after Pearl Harbor. This isn't Vietnam. We know enough now not to fight a war of policy with draftees.

Once again, if you want to see which way the wind is blowing without being a weatherman, look to what the younger people think. They don't think like Hanoi Jane or her buddy Kerry. STFB.

I am shocked, shocked that someone would call a Commmie swine a Commie swine, or even, (gasp) throw a bottle. There's a war on. Think of what similar aid and comfort to the enemy would have elicited after Pearl Harbor. This isn't Vietnam. We know enough now not to fight a war of policy with draftees.

Once again, if you want to see which way the wind is blowing without being a weatherman, look to what the younger people think. They don't think like Hanoi Jane or her buddy Kerry. STFB.

Ah, this story brings a tear to my eye... I can't tell you how many times I've seen protestors protesting things in Hanover and have wanted to start hucking bottles at them. Oh sure, it's wrong, so very very wrong, but I still want to do it just the same.

While I live in the Eastside suburbs and avoid Seattle as much as possible, I remember well the WTO riots. When you go to a "rally" wearing a helmet, mask and cup, you want there to be trouble, and when someone like our bottle thrower won't oblige you, you've got to start smashing windows and lighting fires in the hopes that the police will do it instead. The problem with the WTO was that the police were told to ignore any and all such attempts to provoke a confrontation, which really does take the fun out of it despite all the smoke and broken glass. (In retrospect, while I condemned the Police Chief and Mayor at the time for their inaction, they seem to have made the right decisions, as we haven't seen another attempt like that to disrupt a meeting in the US, have we?)

Last year there were a number of "Support the Troops" rallies instigated in large part by a couple of conservative talk radio stations here, and those are remarkable in that there's never been a report, as far as I can remember, of any problems at any of them. Those people even picked up their own garbage, unlike the leftist gatherings. Many of those rallies were an almost ad hoc response to the feeble "anti-war" efforts, and the comparisons are even more striking. So there is still some hope left for people here in the heart of the Upper Left Washington.

Note also that were riots in Portland, which had neither the WTO experience, nor, as far as I heard, organized opposition demonstrations. (Then again, Portland prides itself on not being Seattle, and that includes not learning from its northern neighbor's mistakes while inventing its own. Sometime I think the Portland motto is "We're the city south of Seattle that's not Tacoma".)

Reminds me of the anti-war protestors on Wall Street meeting up with the construction workers from the World Trade Center site in 1970. Good thing John F. Kerry wasn't there or we'd never hear the end of that combat ordeal, either.

Pot, meet Kettle...

I'll feel badly for the beer-soaked NASCAR protestors the day I can park my car in San Francisco with a "Bush/Cheney'04" sticker on the bumper and not fear some little troll taking a key to the door.

As I recall, my "Sore-Loserman'00" T-shirt wasn't well-received there, either, but then I'm kind of a big guy so the little trolls didn't have the stones to say anything to my face.

furious