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Only bona-fide George W. Bush supporters could enter President Bush's Friday campaign rally in La Crosse. According to Sandra McAnany of Norwalk (see letter to editor), Bush partisans who monitored checkpoints asked people to unbutton their shirts so that nobody with an off-message t-shirt could attend the event. McAnany said she and her 9-year-old son were barred from entering as a result.

Oh well, it was Bush's campaign rally, and it's up to the campaign to decide who gets to see the President and who doesn't (provided that the Bush-Cheney campaign reimburses the city of La Crosse for security costs). However, the experience of McAnany and her son symbolizes an increasing feature of modern politics - people of opposing political persuasions don't talk to each other anymore. In fact, they hardly associate with each other.

It's not just political rallies where this phenomenon occurs. In an increasingly fragmented media market, more and more people consume only media outlets that reinforce their political viewpoints. Commercial talk radio, far from a forum of ideas, is a monologue with like-minded callers for props. On those rare instances when a challenging caller gets through, especially one who can successfully articulate an opposing point of view, the disc jockey cuts the caller off. It's revealing that the king of political talk, Rush Limbaugh, failed spectacularly on ESPN's pre-game football show. It was the one time he ventured beyond a setting he didn't control.

Like Bush's La Crosse rally and Limbaugh's radio show, too much of our politics is staged without any genuine give and take. Perhaps America could learn something from the British, where the Prime Minister must submit to weekly questions from Parliament. The questions are often rough and pointed, but it gets people with different points of view in the same room talking to each other. Imagine Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold asking the President serious questions about the Patriot Act. Such exchanges are far too rare in our national politics.

It's sad when organizers of a political rally can't stand to have people with opposing viewpoints standing side by side. It would seem that a President who describes himself as a "uniter, not a divider" could have withstood a few Democrats attending his political rally, even if they wore t-shirts questioning an administration policy, but that would have deviated from the script. And in today's politics, the script is everything.