Political Vandalism

Stanley Kurtz reports on vandalism against supporters of the president. He forgot to mention the swastika burned in a Bush supporter's lawn in Wisconsin. My wife is a Republican, and she took it upon herself to go down to the local party headquarters and pick up a Bush/Cheney yard sign. That sign, along with no less than nine others within three blocks of where I live, was stolen this past week. Often, like ours, in broad daylight. In the middle of the afternoon. Some of them were taken from houses along one of the major roads in town. A colleague of mine had a bumper sticker torn off his car and his car keyed a few months ago. That same guy had a Bush/Cheney sticker stolen from off of his office door. None of the Kerry/Edwards signs in our neighborhood have been stolen, though a few of them at one house may have been punched or kicked (it's hard to say, they were crumpled in the middle).

I know it goes on on both sides and I will act to stop and have punished anyone I catch in the act of political vandalism. Despite that admission, I wait in anticipation for accusations of my tyranny, hypocrisy, etc. Well, let me take it up a notch--launch a preemptive strike, as it were: I do not as a rule scream about my rights being violated unless they actually are. On the other hand, every single individual who has whined and cried with no evidence about the Patriot Act violating rights is a stone cold hypocrite if they do not condemn with equal fervor and venom every single one of these verifiable acts of theft and vandalism. I want websites. I want t-shirts and bumper stickers supporting free speech and condemning vandals as criminals. I want declarations that those who would engage in criminal acts to stifle the opinions of others are some stripe of totalitarian (communists, Nazis, whatever).

Those who have made complaints about their fundamental rights as Americans and are not outraged and acting to stop widespread theft, destruction of property, and vandalism are quite simply liars and hypocrites who don't care or are too stupid to understand what rights this country really stands for.