Congresswoman should respect security
Checkpoints not about race or gender
When Wolf Blitzer, a respected CNN journalist, asked Rep. Cynthia McKinney whether she assaulted a security guard, McKinney indirectly threatened him with lawyers.
Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” responded to that clip by answering “yes” for her.
While I respect that McKinney is a black female House representative, I feel she was inappropriately using her gender and race to lead a crusade against security personnel.
By disrespecting such authority unfairly and by politicizing the event, she made a bad political move.
McKinney allegedly just stormed through the checkpoint without saying a word to security guards.
All McKinney had to do was affirm that she was a congresswoman, one of the guards was quoted as saying in a CNN article.
Instead, the guards had to stop her like everybody else. McKinney then assaulted them. The degree of the assault varies depending on who was commenting and perhaps the security was really rough. After reading further into the issue, security was just doing its job to keep Congress safe.
The security guards need to do their job regardless of job title, gender, race, creed, orientation and so on. Security guards can’t be expected to know all 435 House representatives and 100 senators by face and name. There’s even a chance criminals may pose as representatives or assistants.
N.D. Rep. Earl Pomeroy can’t be safe if such guards have to bend the rules for certain people. That especially applies to people who don’t identify themselves, like McKinney.
Of course, there may have been some inequality.
It would be unfair for McKinney to completely assume the guards weren’t being unfair and biased toward women and African Americans.
However, McKinney destroyed the chance of possibly uncovering any actual bias by politicizing the event.
If anything, McKinney’s loud and angry rally for support made the incident that much worse.
No matter where people side on the issue, it ultimately took place due to a major misunderstanding within one of the parties or perhaps both. This was also a sensitive case with the serious claims McKinney made about racism. This belongs between lawyers and civil court, not on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
McKinney obviously feels case information is sensitive: She threatened Blitzer with lawyers when he asked her a simple question. That’s more reason to believe McKinney was taking this event out of proportion.
By not answering simple questions in an event she made very public, McKinney led others to make their own conclusions based on incident reports. The officers and witnesses were more than happy to address their side, which makes McKinney look like a crazy person. McKinney sealed that reputation through her rude and crazy behavior toward members of the press.
If McKinney chose to communicate with others and didn’t politicize the assault, it may have been mediated by now. But, she chose to go crazy.
The Tuesday edition of The Daily Show suggested McKinney might be using this as political momentum for the fall 2006 elections. I hope her Georgia district doesn’t re-elect somebody who would politicize something without talking about it first.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum