Out in San Francisco, a Code Pink protester — you know, the fuschia folks who strangely lost interest in protesting against military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even Libya, once Barack Obama became commander-in-chief — threw a pink “glitter bomb” at Tim Pawlenty. Actually, they just dumped pink confetti on his book-signing table.
During the Bush years, no administration official or Pentagon official could finish a sentence of testimony on Capitol Hill without some aged activist whose physique strangely suggested a great deal of inactivism leaping out of her chair and screaming some incoherent chant as a tired Capitol Police officer dragged them away, oh so slowly. Oftentimes the Pinkers would come in bunches, apparently believing that President Bush would have no choice but to suddenly order all U.S. troops out of the war zone because his cabinet couldn’t finish a paragraph of prepared testimony.
[Strangely, I don’t recall Code Pink ever being compared to Tim McVeigh or called “un-American,” even though rowdy crowds at town-hall meetings in the summer of 2009 were certainly no more disruptive to a lawmaker’s public statements than Code Pink. Yet Code Pinkers have no problem associating with and in fact politely greeting sponsors of terrorism like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.]
Still, in matters of war and peace, passions run hot. Clearly, the Code Pinker deemed Pawlenty’s support of military action in Afghanistan or Libya under Obama’s leadership an egregious case of callous warmongering, right? She aimed and wielded her unlicensed, extended clip assault bag of high-caliber confetti at Pawlenty for his unwillingness to work to end military conflict, right?
The pink shower came with the chant, “Where is your courage to stand for gay rights and reproductive rights.” And, “Welcome to San Francisco; home of gay hero Harvey Milk.”
The objection, it seems, is that Pawlenty has the audacity to disagree with the protester on the issue of abortion and gay rights. How dare he.
Code Pink has dropped any pretense of being an issue-based organization; they simply find any old issue or stance of a disliked public figure and let fly their Improvised Glitter Devices.