The Heart of Pinkness

Throughout yesterday and today's hearings with General Petraeus you could see members of the anti-war freak* group Code Pink, all obviously costumed in pink T-shirts, some wearing crowns, plunked down in the galleries. During a few quiet moments between presentations members (one at a time) stood up, shouted stuff like "The American people don't believe you anymore!" and were dragged out. Rush Limbaugh thinks he knows how they got there.

Now, Code Pink just didn't walk in there and get tickets. They were all dressed up, and you couldn't miss these people. They looked like deranged jacks-in-the-box, totally deranged, miserable, unhappy, ugly fat women. Thank you. Thank you. They didn't get in there by accident. Democrat staffers no doubt arranged for them to get in there and cause this little protest to call Petraeus a liar.

All completely wrong. Official Democrats loathe Code Pink and didn't give them any favors. Why would they when Pinkers spend free afternoons occupying Democrats' offices or trashing Nancy Pelosi's yard? The less exciting, but true, explanation is that the Code Pink people got in line. They showed up early and filed in for places near the back of the room. (So did anti-war libertarian Adam Kokesh, more incognito in an "Iraq Veterans Against the War" T-shirt.) Capitol police could see that they belonged to an anti-war group and even odds were they'd burst out screaming at some point during the hearing. You can find them irritating (I do) but I don't know why the alternative—cops banning certain citizens from hearings based on their clothes and possible behavior—is so attractive to Limbaugh.

*freak in the Frank Zappa/Gilbert Shelton sense