Cancer-stricken children, parents ejected from park near White House

Hey, page two and YankeeFan finally showed us where he was going with this all along.

The bold words are the key here, though I don't think it is a guess as much as it a reach designed to justify the arrest of the 14-year-old kid from Texas. Basically, he doesn't want to say the Secret Service was justified, but if they were, then so were the police in Irving, TX. Except the situations were completely different and YF had to invent a hypothetical situation and make up a response to support his argument.

 

Sigh ... And we're off.

 

To be fair, YF has repeatedly tried to connect this to the kid in Texas even though there's no common thread between them.

 

Both the USSS and the cops in Texas took measures that were unnecessary.

Overreaction to potential security threats is not limited to cops in Texas, or to "suspects" with brown skin and Muslim names.

I think it is worth remembering this before we accuse folks who might have acted stupidly of doing so for racial reasons.

I also think that if we want to reduce this kind of thing, we need to point it out in other instances as well. It would even be nice if the roll back of this silly security theater, and treating everyone like they are a threat, even 14-year-olds with home made clocks, and kids with cancer, started at the top.

President Obama celebrated the kid in Texas, and by doing so made clear that he though the officials there over reacted. But, his own security over reacts on a daily basis.

 

The SS can't even guard the damn fence very well, let alone the doors. And remember the party crashers?

 

I agree with this, particularly as it relates to airport and stadium security.

However, it's still a tremendous reach to connect the two incidents. Nobody was arrested or detained in D.C. They were ordered to leave the area so the President could be securely moved not because they were perceived as a threat, but because it is extremely difficult to identify a threat if it exists within a crowd of 700 people.

If you think that's the same as an intellectually curious kid who was handcuffed, detained and suspended from school because he built a clock to show his engineering teacher, then I don't know what to say.

 

I'll just note that "because he built" is not the same as "as a result of his building." If it were the same, one could as credibly say these cancer patients were chased out of Lafayette Park because they had a life-threatening disease.

 

They know it's miles apart, but there was a "news" hole to fill on the 27/7 sj.com bluster cycle.

 

Says one of the chief proponents of "zero tolerance" policy.

This is the guy who thought the TV reporter in St. Louis should have been arrested:

 

There's 27 hours in a day? No wonder the baseball season is 192 games long.

 

If you want to parse it, I probably should have said he was "handcuffed, detained and suspended from school because he built a clock and brought it to school to show his engineering teacher." Whatever.

 

Yes, these two events are exactly the same.

And pointing out one example and linking it to zero tolerance is hypocritical if you know what zero tolerance actually means.

Has anyone posted the government apology on this thread?