Guess what? GI Joe wasn't the first ReThug to sick goons on the press.
I seem to remember, one Willard Mitt Romney AKA Mittens, had a staffer accused of pulling over a reporter, detaining them, and running their license plate in New Hampshire back in 2007.
Follow me below the fold for details.
NOTE: many of the original links didn't work for me, which is why I used this Blogspot link as an aggregator of all the stories from 2007.
He travels with an entourage that includes two or three “operations” guys who serve as advance men and a security detail. (Between stops in New Hampshire, this reporter found himself trailing the former governor’s S.U.V. on a back road, only to be led to the shoulder and instructed to “veer off” by a man wearing an earpiece who emerged from Mr. Romney’s car. “We ran your license plate,” he told the reporter, and explained that no one was permitted to follow Mr. Romney’s vehicle.)
Not that this looks good:
It turns out that Romney maintained as governor an Office of Operations that was sort of informal secret service for the governor. Here’s a description of his operation from a 2005 Boston Herald article:
Some office staff, who all wear LXX pins, fashion themselves as U.S. Secret Service agents, referring to Romney in their earpieces and audio-equipped wrist pieces as "70" - similar to the way the Secret Service agents identify President Bush as "43" because he is the 43rd president.
And then there's this:
A top aide to Gov. Mitt Romney was cited last week for tooling around with illegal police equipment in his private car - from lights and sirens to batons and heavily tinted windows.
Romney’s director of operations, Jay A. Garrity, had parked the car illegally in the North End and police ordered it towed.
Police discovered a set of red-and-blue flashing lights hidden in the grill - equipment for which Garrity has no permit.
Cops also found a siren and public address system, multiple police radios, strobe lights on the wheels, a police baton and a metal plate with a photo of a state police patch that said “official business.'’
Gee all that's missing is duct tape, a hunting knife, rope, and a shovel.
Snip.
The original story was confirmed by the NYT Reporter, Mark Leibovich:
“As we reported, I was instructed to veer off, which to me is the same as telling someone to leave,” Leibovich said in an interview. “I obviously cannot speak to whether they ran my license plate or not. I can only speak to what the person told me he was doing.”
New Hampshire law does not allow campaign aides access to license plate databases, nor does it allow private staffers to pull over fellow citizens.
Methinks GI Joe TM and his supporters are missing the irony. These teahadists claim Barack Hussein Obama is depriving them of this freedom or that freedom. Of course we are talking about the freedom to not pay taxes and get something for nothing, which is a corruption of what the original Boston Tea Party was about: taxation without representation. They don't consider Obama and the Democrats legitimate so there you go...
I digressed a bit there. What I am stressing is how these extremists miss the irony that they are depriving people of the most basic civil liberties and unilaterally designating themselves as judge, jury, and jailer.
As Keith said on Countdown tonight, Miller was actually praising Stasi and the ability of East German to police its borders. Actually they did a shit job, as about 5,000 people successfully crossed just the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. The official death total there is 136.
And that's just Berlin. But hey, if you want to be the candidate linked to totalitarian jack-booted Stasi thugs, lots of luck GI Joe TM.