So I guess that means the terrorists win. Meet the tiny tee terrorist.

and his weapon of mass destruction

Thirteen year old Zachary Guiles wore this t-shirt to school one day, thinking no doubt that he was giving The Man the finger.

But The Man don’t like to be fingered.

Next thing you know, Zach‘s cool, antiestablishment shirt is festooned with duct tape censoring out parts of the obvious message. I’m not making a great leap when I say that the coke lines were probably on the no-fly list, and perhaps the words “World Domination Tour” and maybe even “Chickenhawk In Chief“.

An appeals court in New York found that Zachary’s constitutional rights were violated when officials at his Vermont school made him stick duct tape over parts of the T-shirt. The shirt also said the president was undertaking a “world domination tour” and showed a picture of his head superimposed on a chicken’s body, along with cocaine, a razor blade and a martini glass. Zachary was suspended for a day, but continued to wear the T-shirt to school, complete with duct tape.

and rightly so; covering up the occurrance is nothing more than capitulation to censorship, so I am very glad that our young freedom fighter Zach bore the scars of his battle proudly.

But he did not bear them lightly, nor did he bear them alone.

Lawyers for Williamstown middle high school argued the images contravened the school’s ban on clothes promoting drink and drugs, but the court rejected the idea on the grounds that the T-shirt expressed “an anti-drug view”. Mr Bush has spoken of his battles with alcohol earlier in his life.

The T-shirt “uses harsh rhetoric and imagery to express disagreement with the president’s policies and to impugn his character”, the court ruled, but the images “are not plainly offensive as a matter of law”.

“The standard that the court set was that a kid has free-speech rights as long as the expression of those rights doesn’t upset the normal workings of a school,” said Allen Gilbert, of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case.

Zachary said: “I think this is a very good sign that even with the current administration … there can still be a justice that allows free speech.”

He sounds almost as surprised as me!