Three attendees at a Bush Social Security rally in Denver in March - Leslie Weise, a lawyer; Karen Bauer, a temporary office worker; and Alex Young, a computer technician - were were summarily tossed out of the event, ostensibly because one of them had an anti-Bush bumper sticker on her car.

Except for Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown,” the story disappeared in the Old Media, until it re-surfaced today in, of all places, the New York Times:

Three months ago, the three were thrown out of a taxpayer-financed Bush Social Security event in Denver by a person they thought was a Secret Service agent, reportedly because of a “No More Blood for Oil” bumper sticker on one of their cars. Similar incidents have occurred at other presidential events around the country, and the three have not been silent since.

Last week they were in Washington demanding to know the identity of the “mystery man” who ejected them…

So does the Secret Service, which … said that it was continuing a criminal investigation into whether anyone had unlawfully impersonated a Secret Service agent, and that when the findings were concluded they would be sent, as is routine, to a federal prosecutor to see if charges should be filed.

And we all be holding our collective breath, won’t we?

The White House was having none of it.

“It’s clear that these three protesters are trying to advance their own political agenda,” Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said in an interview Friday. Asked who the mystery man was, Mr. McClellan did not respond and then said he had no interest in going over yet again the events in Denver on March 21.

So these three citizens had valid tickets to attend a taxpayer-funded event but were tossed out by a Bush political operative who pretended to be a Secret Service agent in order to intimidate them.

This incident just about sums up life under Bush: Citizens who aren’t idealogically pure are removed from a fake event by a thug posing as a government agent.