Common Sense

Five Congresspersons were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy after protesting and calling on the Sudanese government to allow UN peacekeepers access to the victims of the genocide in Darfur.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, the arrests, but it still shows some guts if you’re willing to be led away in handcuffs. If someone is just watching that on TV without any sound (like I was) one might think they had something to do with the Duke Cunningham prostitution ring.

Sheila Jackson Lee, Tom Lantos, Jim Moran, James McGovern and John Oliver were all led away (WMV and Quicktime videos). Don’t the know the first rule of getting arrested is to wear a jacket so have something to lay your head on in the holding cell? Amateurs.

I think this is going to have the intended consequence they were going for. Five members of Congress being led away in handcuffs to spend a night in the pokey will be front-page news everywhere and be played on TV. If journalists do their job, then maybe we’ll see a rise in activism and enough political pressure to finally do something about Darfur.