Thursday, April 20, 2006
Bush-n-Hu
In a perfectly timed dance with the Universe, my sister-in-law and brother Shawn moved to the area last year. He's pursuing new work after a fiasco with his former employer, and she is working as a White House Fellow (in a non-partisan capacity) at, umm, the White House. As part of the job, she gets to attend White House functions, which when unavailable, as was the case today, she can pass along the perks to family.
Quite ironically today, the aforementioned fiasco involved Shawn's discovery of what looked like state-sanctioned espionage from China against the US. A whole cavalcade of bureaucracy followed after the discovery, which ultimately ended in his wrongful termination. It's a crazy cloak and dagger story, which you can read about here if you're so inclined, but nonetheless, today was an interesting macro/micro view of the charade of politics du jour. I somehow ended up in the press section (enter bigwheedle), which was also infiltrated by a protestor. It took an incredibly long time for the Secret Service to get to her, several minutes even, such that she actually stopped yelling for awhile, went back to filming with her camcorder, then started yelling again. Meanwhile, I hoped they wouldn't decide to oust me in the process.