The state of the union

Charges against antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan, who was arrested after an incident involving a T-shirt she wore to the State of the Union address, will be dropped, officials told NBC News Wednesday.

U.S. Capitol Police took Sheehan away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor, when she showed up to President Bush's address Tuesday night wearing a shirt that read, "2245 Dead. How many more?" -- a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.

But Capitol Police will ask the U.S. attorney's office to drop the charges, NBC News' Mike Viqueira reported Wednesday.

"We screwed up," a top Capitol Police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Sheehan didn't violate any rules or laws.

The state of the union is such that she would be arrested, on the assumption that wearing such a shirt on such an occasion must be illegal. The state of the union is also such that, partly because she is a celebrity, she is free and the charges will be quickly dropped. Welcome to Mexico. Our new motto: We're more democratic than Turkey.

Here's the highlight of Ms. Sheehan's description of what happened:

I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled; "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I'm going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.

The officer ran with me to the elevators yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That's Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said: "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn't care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That's because you were protesting." Wow, I get hauled out of the People's House because I was, "Protesting."

I was never told that I couldn't wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things...I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately, and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."

General Notes

Prompted by friends' posts and comments of the past several weeks:

• The people who say they're too soft-hearted are rarely the ones who are. More often, they have a normal amount of conflict between selfishness and compassion, but they idealize sociopaths. Because they (sanely) reject their sociopathic ideal, they feel inferior and believe they "should" be more of an asshole. (That was prompted by an educated guess of who the "anonymous" was that made such a claim. If you made the claim and you're not someone on my friends list hiding your identity, consider it food for thought rather than a specific claim about yourself.)
• When someone claims there were a bunch of reasons for an individual action, be suspicious. It's likely that there's one big reason and the person doesn't want to own how important that reason is to them.
  
  But when someone claims there's a single reason for a collective action (such as in politics), be equally suspicious. Controversial actions require the support of many individuals, and those individuals will rarely be overwhelmingly motivated by the same single factor. Ascribing, for instance, the war to a single motivation and then rejecting that motivation as a factor at all just because one discovers a more important motivation, is not an example scientific thinking. It is rather an example of just the sort of mis-applied Aristotelian dichotomous thinking that the friend who wants to make such a claim has rightly warned us to avoid.