I  questioned why some genius in San Francisco decided that a torch was more worthy of police protection than American citizens exercising a basic constitutional right.  Now I learn from  Marc Randazza that it was worse than I thought.  Per this Daily News article :

As she ran with the flame, Majora Carter, 41, a South Bronx environmental activist, whipped out a small Tibetan flag to condemn China’s human rights abuses in the Himalayan province.

Carter said a Chinese paramilitary squad escorting the torch pounced and turned her over to cops, who pushed her into the crowd.

“Apparently, I’m not part of the Olympic torch-bearing entourage anymore,” Carter quipped.

Now how come nobody mentioned that there was a Chinese paramilitary squad accompanying the torch?  On American soil? 

And since when do San Francisco police officers take their marching orders from the Chinese?

While some readers who show a strong preference for order over law may argue that my view of what the police should have been doing with regard to the protesters along the secret, ever-changing torch route might have been disrespectful to the “spirit” of the Olympic Games (as if the Chinese abuses in Tibet aren’t), what our cops did to Majora Carter can’t be so easily dismissed.

Majora Carter’s act of defiance cannot possibly be viewed as disruptive to the travel of the torch (that would be the torch that is more important than human beings) since she was the torch bearer.  She carried it.  She ran with it.  She went in the direction she was supposed to go.  She just took out a small Tibetan flag as she did so.  Where’s the harm?

Randazza’s description (with quite vivid imagery) of the Chinese troopers, together with our very own police, abrogating Carter’s political act goes much farther than here.  But adding to the mess comes the reactions of a few other torchbearers:

Fellow torch-bearer Richard Doran, 57, a retired FDNY firefighter, called Carter’s maverick move “disgusting and appalling.”

“I think she dishonored herself and her family, and if she wanted to do that, she should’ve given up her spot to someone else,” said Doran, 57, who carried the torch wearing his Rescue 4 helmet to honor firefighters killed on 9/11.

Retired NYPD cop Jim Dolan, 64, who also carried the flame, agreed, saying, “That was not the time and place to do it. We were there to represent the best of American citizens.”

Unless I’m mistaken, the “best of American citizens” is to blindly support Chinese communist abuse in Tibet.  Since when did New York’s Finest and Bravest become a bunch of commie lovers?

Of course, they really aren’t commie lovers.  They are rule lovers.  They are lovers of Order.  They do what they are told.  There is no higher calling than to maintain order.  And that is perhaps the worst indictment of what happened here.

While we’re busily whipping out rhetoric in other quarters about how young Americans are dying to protect our freedom, situations like this smack us in the face to remind everyone that few even comprehend what freedom means.  It makes their deaths that much more tragic, and our freedom that much more tenuous.  But it sure makes us swell with pride when it said with patriotic music in the background.  I wonder if the Chinese goon squad feels the same way?