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Politcal Rant

The Bush Commencement Speech at OSU

This last Saturday President Bush gave the commencement speech at the Oklahoma State University graduation ceremony. OSU is in Stillwater, about 15-20 miles from me. The closest Lowes and Wal-Mart Super Center is in Stillwater.

Anyway, it was raining that day and the event was being held in the football stadium, OSU didn’t have an auditorium large enough to hold the expected crowd.

They didn’t allow umbrellas. Security.

You might think the umbrella ban was because of concern about what kind of weapons could be concealed in an umbrella. You might think that until you thought pf what kind of weapons could be conealed under a poncho.

I had to buy a new lawn mower Saturday and so I drove into Stillwater. Got the lawnmower at Lowes and stopped at Wal-Mart for some groceries. Wall-Mart was doing a very brisk business in OSU branded ponchos.

This part of OKlahoma (probably all of Oklahoma) is very much Bush country. As the two people in the all night coffee shop in Forestt County, Mississippi said that night before the last presidential election, "He's an incompetent boob, but we have to vote for him 'cause he's not going to let them queers get married". Bush truely has the pulse of the country.

But, back to his speech in Stillwater. Because the Secret Service is on their toes, staying one step ahead of the terrorists, we haven’t had a sitting President attacked by a suicide umbrella thrower since Gerald Ford.

To be fair, the reason for the no-umbrella rule is that everyone had to go through metal detectors, or be scanned by hand-held detectors, and the metal spikes on an umbrella wouldn't pass the detector.

But did I mention that it was raining? All they had to do was have everyone with an umbrella pass it to a cop (the cops were standing around sheperding people thru the detectors.

That would have required a little more security resources. I guess my point is that the no-umbrella rule wasn't for security reasons. It was for convinience of the security forces. It's a small thing but it's something that troubles me a lot about this administration. They expect us to give up liberties and they claim it's for security, but it's not for security. It's for the convinience of the government.