Protestor disrupt Hu speech at White House

The Secret Service identified her as Wenyi Wang, 47.

She shouted in heavily accented English, "President Bush: Stop him from killing" and, "President Bush, stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong."

A Mandarin-speaking cameraman said Wang shouted in Mandarin: "Falun Gong is good. Stop persecuting Falun Gong, Hu Jintao. Your time is over. Evil people will die early."

Bush, standing next to Hu, leaned over and whispered to Hu, "You're OK," indicating the Chinese leader should proceed with his opening remarks. Hu, who had paused briefly when the shouting began, resumed speaking.

"It's hugely embarrassing," said Derek Mitchell, a former Asia adviser at the Defense Department who is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. China "must know that this Bush administration is good at controlling crowds for themselves, and the fact that they couldn't control this is going to play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States, into mistrust about American intentions toward China."

I have several points to make about this:

First of all, heckling elected officials is one of the things that makes this country great. The U.S. has a long and storied tradition of protestors briefly disrupting the pompous speeches of presidents on down to mayors. For the most part it's Liberals rudely heckling Conservative speakers but that's all right...political speech has always been, and should remain, the most protected form of free speech. That being said, there are places and means by which citizens should express themselves. One could argue that to heckle visiting national leaders is stepping over the line of decorum but that is one of the prices of free speech...you might not like what's being said, which brings me to the second point...

Free political speech is but one of the freedoms which 1.3billion Chinese people do not enjoy. A few others are, the right to not have forced abortions, the right to not be forcibly sterilized, the right to not have one's execution fasttracked because a rich Japanese guy wants your kidneys, the right to practice whatever religion one chooses, and the right to Google on the Internet any, literally any, topic one wishes. There are many other State human rights atrocities on record in China so for one lady to express her disappointment is not only understandable but expected.

Third, and this really irked me, this hack Derek Mitchell said that it's embarrassing that the Bush administration cannot control it's own crowds. I'm sorry, since when is a political party in the business of crowd control? Since when is political dissent embarrassing in this country? Certainly, as in the case of liberal, Hollywood activists, what's being said and how it's being said can be embarrassing, but political dissent in and of itself definitely should not be.

The message Hu Jintao should have gotten from this is that citizens in a free society may voice, and loudly, their political differences in all kinds of ways, and the state of the Union is made stronger and more healthy for it.