Fingergate

[richlevy]

My wife saw this story on the news and told me about it tonight. It seems to have picked up some steam.

Reichert bragged about getting finger-waving bus driver firedSEATTLE (AP) — Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., bragged at a Republican Party picnic last summer that the day after a school bus driver flipped off President Bush, he called the district's superintendent, leaving picnic-goers with the impression that he was responsible for getting the driver fired.
That differs from a version of the story told by Issaquah School District officials and Reichert's staff this week: That Reichert didn't speak to the superintendent for weeks, and that by the time he did, the bus driver had already been fired. His press secretary said Friday the discrepancy was "not a big deal" and that at the picnic Reichert was just telling a story, not trying to reconstruct the timeline exactly.
The bus driver, a 43-year-old single mother, was bringing a busload of middle-school children back from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle on June 16 when the president and Reichert drove slowly by in a motorcade on their way to a fundraiser. From the bus, stopped on an onramp to Interstate 5, the children waved; with the windows down in their car, Bush and Reichert waved back.

Reichert, a freshman congressman who is in a tight re-election campaign against Democrat Darcy Burner, has used the anecdote on the campaign trail to illustrate there's a proper way and an improper way to disagree with the president. One can disagree with president while still showing respect to the office, he says.

Wow, another elected official who just loves the Constitution. I'm not going to say it was perfectly alright for a school bus driver to give anyone the finger with kids on the bus, but I don't consider a single incident grounds for dismissal, no matter who the recipient was.

School district spokeswoman Sara Niegowski said Friday that the bus driver was fired in early September — after Reichert's speech on Aug. 12 — but that the process of terminating her began the day of the incident.
Niegowski also said the firing was not about who the driver flipped off, but because she made the gesture in front of students.
Chris Dugovich, president of Council 2 of the Washington State Council of County and City Employees, disputed that Friday. No children saw the driver's gesture because she held her hand high out the window while the children were all looking at the president, he said. He added that when the district fired the woman in September, officials cited "a presidential aide" as the source of the complaint.
"She did this in a manner in which the kids clearly would not see it," Dugovich said. "She also apologized immediately to the school district. In 25 years I can't recall an instance where that type of incident would warrant that type of penalty."

This Reichert guy sounds like an asshole. I wish he'd come here so I could give him the finger.