Posted on Sun, Oct. 19, 2008
Kennedy: No crime to be 'rude,' especially in an election year
BUD KENNEDY
bud@star-telegram.com
We have 17 more days of crazy e-mails coming.
But beneath all the chain letters calling various candidates terrorists, fascists, communists, space aliens or the Antichrist, now and then somebody actually sends an e-mail that is true.
Jessica Hughes of rural Angelina County wrote one of those e-mails Oct. 2.
She was furious after Secret Service agents questioned her over a snappish cellphone conversation Oct. 1, when a Texarkana campaign volunteer thought she threatened Barack Obama.
Hughes, 32, an oil landman and mother of three, says she was blasting Obama over his stand on legal abortion. But from what the agents told her, the volunteer only heard her say "dead on a hospital floor."
This might have been a real-life version of that TV commercial in which the cellphone signal cuts out at a dramatic moment.
All we know is that the moment the federal agents left, an angry Hughes wrote a passionate e-mail.
In the e-mail, now copied across churches worldwide to bash Obama and what Hughes called the "thought police," she repeated her response to the caller: "No, I donÂ’t support him! Your guy is a socialist who voted four times in the state Senate to let little babies die in hospital closets. I think you should find something better to do with your time."
(Obama opposed a Born Alive Protection Act in Illinois, but supporters have said that the bill went beyond protecting babies and might have left doctors and hospitals civilly liable after abortions.)
According to Hughes, agents accused her of saying, "I will never support Obama and he will wind up dead on a hospital floor."
She quoted one agent: "So — what do you think about Barack Obama?" The other agent told her she was "rude."....