September 20, 2003
U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Dallas) Aides Call Police to Stop Free Speech
By Byron LaMasters
A friend and I handed out these flyers outside of a Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Dallas) meeting on Social Security in Richardson (Dallas suburb) this morning. We didn't do anything to disrupt the meeting, we simply asked people as they left the event outside if they would like a flyer, and handed out several dozen that way. We just felt that it was important that the good people of Texas' 32nd Congressional district know that their congressman knowingly hired a criminal thug to be his communications director. Aides to Pete Sessions had a security guard at the school ask us to leave, and when we objected, telling him that we had every right to be there, they called the police. At that point we left, but the behavior is quite typical of the Sessions team.
Here is the flyer which we handed out (click on the image for an enlarged version):
Posted by Byron LaMasters at September 20, 2003 02:04 PM
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You're lucky you left before the police arrived to arrest you for violating the prohibition against gross non sequitir in political debate: "Sessions hired a dirty tricks staffer, therefore privatizing Social Security is bad."
Ok, Byron, I havn't posted much and I don't usually agree with Mark, but I have to say the leap from hiring the naughty staffer to the social security arguement have my head a bit of a spin. Who put that flyer together? It's not that any of it isn't true, both arguements separate seem fine.
And it doesn't suprise me about them attempting to strong arm you.
The issue is Sessions charactor and trustworthiness. A friend made the flyer. The reason it was tied to social security was because the event was about social security. The purpose of the flyer was to inform people of Sessions affiliations with this criminal, then question his character for it. If we can't trust Pete Sessions to hire people of charactor, then how can we trust him with our social security? There's nothing untruthful in the flyer...
You are right, there is nothing untruthful in the flyer. But there is nothing that makes that argumentative connection unique. As in "If we can't trust Pete Sessions to hire people of charactor, then how can we trust him with our (fill in the blank)" It's an open ended attack.
But granted he still gets major bonehead points for hiring a criminal.
Who cares if the argumentative connection is unique. The oldest trick in politics is to convince people that your opponent is untrustworthy. That's what we attempted to do with this flyer. And it works. People don't vote for people they can't trust. Sure, the two questions about social security are loaded questions (especially the second one), but it's politics... it's nothing compared to the type of push polls that the Bush campaign did against John McCain in South Carolina (i.e. "Would you vote for John McCain if you knew that he had an affair with a Vietnamese woman, fathered an illegitimate child, hired an illegal immigrant and used cocaine?").
Maybe it's because I'm young and havn't been burned by politcs yet. I am still one of those people that wishes politics wouldn't resort to the "oldest campaign tricks in the book." Maybe that's why Dean is so attractive to me and some of his competitors becoming less so.
As religious as I am, haha, I guess that I still think about the other person in relation to how I would feel if I was treated like that. It could come from the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" line.
Or maybe it's because I feel things in term of me being gay, as in, "what would I feel like if I was attacked in such and such way."
Then again it's 2:23 a.m. and I could be rambling.
