It’s been a big week for political protesters. First, there were the thousands who gathered for an anti-war demonstration in the capital Saturday. Then a Georgetown undergrad showed up in New Orleans and tried to upstage a Senate Homeland Security hearing on Katrina recovery. He was dragged from the meeting after he stood up and began shouting that the panel should probe the White House’s late response to the disaster. Back in Washington, yesterday a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the nomination of John Negroponte for deputy secretary of state was interrupted again and again as women from the antiwar group CodePink shouted slogans from the gallery and were escorted out.
One of the women, dressed in a bright pink NO IRAN WAR shirt, screamed: “This is not a man to speak for diplomacy! We need a diplomat!” all the way out the door. After that, the hearing went along as planned. For a while, anyway. Apparently, the woman wasn’t about to take “And Don’t Come Back” for an answer. A little while later, she snuck back into the hearing room, fooling the ever-watchful Capitol Police with an ingenious disguise: She zipped a fleece jacket over her bright pink shirt. She managed to stifle her next outburst until the meeting was adjourned, and sat quietly while two more of her friends were ejected. One called Negroponte a “war criminal” on her way out.
So did the Pinksters get their message across? Sort of. As the Capitol Police cleared the last of the screaming protestors, committee chair Joe Biden, who knows a thing or two about getting attention, joked, “That proves the acoustics in the room are good.”
