I Booed Dubya Successfully

The police are still dying to find out how he got a ticket to the “blue” VIP section on the West Lawn during the recent Presidential Inauguration. But Harvard Divinity School student Jeremiah Jenkins refused to reveal his secret, even to FM. This editor of HDS student publication “No Empire: A Journal of Conscience” has an agenda that does not include outing his sources.

During the inaugural speech, Jenkins was sitting really close to Dubya. “If I had an egg I could have hit [Bush] in the head,” he says. He also happened to be right near a handful of women from CodePink—a women’s advocacy group for peace—and two other non-affiliated men who stood and unfurled anti-war signs. Taking his own action, Jenkins stood up and began to chant at the top of his lungs, “Hey Bush, where are the poor? Did you ship them all off to war?”

The police escorted them away swiftly and booked Jenkins for “loud and boisterous disorderly contact.” He and the other protestors were supposed to spend the night in jail and then appear before a judge the following morning.

But Jenkins, who has previously been charged with “playing in the street” at other anti-Bush and WTO protests, draws from his vast protest experience to assert that the police were being particularly harsh in this case.

“Typically, for that kind of offense, you tend to be able to pay your way out right away,” he says. “They were being hard asses.”

But luckily for Jenkins, one of the more laissez-faire feminists of CodePink had slipped out of her handcuffs while in the police van and grabbed his cell phone from his pocket, using it to call the D.C. lawyer’s guild. A lawyer arrived shortly, and Jenkins and his fellow demonstrators were released by 3:30 a.m.

For the petty price of $25, little more than two meals at Spice, Jenkins won the gratification of having interrupted “the President of the most powerful nation in the world,” as he told Time Magazine.

Now that’s making good use of your time and money.