Adventures in Stupidity

School yearbooks used to have silly pictures and joking statements from the students, but didn't used to contain threats, real or imagined, against the President of the United States (from Newsmax):

High school yearbooks were recalled so that administrators could black out a joke caption under one student's picture: "most likely to assassinate President Bush."

Mesa Ridge High School officials recalled about 100 yearbooks earlier this month and had staffers use markers to obscure the words in them and in the still-undistributed copies. The Secret Service even launched an investigation.

"They kind of ruined our yearbook," said Christina Tredway, who just graduated from the school just south of Colorado Springs. Most students thought the blacking-out was a bad idea since the caption obviously was a joke, she said.

Widefield School District officials called the caption a prank that wasn't caught before the yearbooks were printed, and district spokesman James Drew said future yearbooks will be triple-checked before printing.

Lon Garner, special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Denver District, said the agency would look into the incident because all threats against the president must be investigated.

"That's our mission," he said. "That's what we do."

There were several other joke captions in the book, including "most likely to forget his gown at graduation." Names of those involved were not released.

As much as the students would like to think that this is funny, making threats against the president is a federal offense, and somebody on the staff at that high school should have been editing that book and caught that stupid statement long before it ever got in print.

Could it be that the faculty member assigned to supervise the yearbooks didn't remove it because he/she also thought the statement was a joke and appropriate for a student yearbook?