Protesters Heckle Bush At July 4 Monticello Event

With the carefully pre-screened, hand-picked audiences that he has always faced in his eight years in the White House, it's not often that George W. Bush gets a earful from ordinary citizens.

But he did on July 4, as protesters spoke out for many of us when they screamed "Impeach Bush!" and "War Criminal!" to Bush during a July 4 appearance he made at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

I find Bush's "We believe in free speech in the United States" remark particularly ironic. Even as Bush was making this comment, protesters trying to exercise freedom of speech were being forcibly removed from the event.

Speaking of freedom of speech, how about Joseph Wilson's freedom of speech? He tried to inform the American people that Bush's case for war in Iraq was a pack of lies. In return, his wife, Valerie Plame was treasonously outed as a covert CIA agent, which destroyed her career (and no doubt put the lives of other agents in the field in jeopardy).

From silencing government scientists speaking out on global warming to using our tax dollars to pay a newspaper columnist to peddle propaganda, it's clear that Bush holds the concept of "freedom of speech" as much in contempt as he does the rest of the Constitution.