Code Pinkos Get Sympathy From The NY Times

The Code Pinko protesters who insist on disrupting congressional hearings while screaming at our military leadership got some sympathy from the NY Times (from Special Report):

When anti-war protesters dressed in pink costumes repeatedly disrupted the House hearing with General Petraeus on Monday, screaming that the general was a liar and resisting when police dragged them out, Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton said they would not only be kicked out, but prosecuted.

That was too much for The New York Times, which declared in an editorial that while ordering them out of the room was, "understandable," but having them prosecuted, "seemed like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be heard."

The House Committee Chairman Ike Skelton also needed some education about the Code Pinko group according to this report at The Corner:

Politico's Jonathan Martin has posted the Youtube clip of the chaos that ensued at the beginning of yesterday's hearing, when Gen. Petraeus's microphone failed.

Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), about halfway through the 8-minute clip, says quietly in front of a live mic that the disruption by Code Pink activists "really pisses me off." He utters a few profanities and then converses casually with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), who explains to him the group's strategy:

HUNTER: Here's their strategy. There's about ten of them, so they're going to sacrifice one about every five minutes. If they do that, I'd move the whole identifiable group out.

SKELTON: I can't do that

HUNTER: Well because they're all in the same group, the same dress. The pink people — they're an association...

Skelton apparently decided that prosecution is a better solution than throwing out whole groups of people.

The Dems are foolish to allow these people to continue to attend and disrupt hearings. It makes the leadership look foolish and completely incompetent (which, of course, they may well be).