No such luck. Several times during both the House and Senate hearings, Code Pink protestors interrupted the testimony. They stood, shouting and waving banners, until police escorted them out. Here’s how a New York Times editorial describes the interruption in the House: “When protesters interrupted the hearing, Rep. Skelton ordered them removed from the room, which is understandable. But then he said that they would be prosecuted. That seemed like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be heard.”
That, of course, completely distorts what these “protestors” want to do. They don’t want to be heard; they want to prevent others from being heard.
Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker came to Washington lawmakers to give their views, and they did so. The Code Pink activists in the room didn’t want to hear from them, and more than that, they wanted to prevent others from hearing from them. So they disrupted the hearings until they were removed from the room.
To put it in terms the Times editors can understand, if the protestors had wanted to “be heard” they had many outlets. They could have written an op-ed and submitted it to the newspaper, for example. Instead, they tried, in effect, to stand in front of the newspaper box and prevent other people from buying the paper.
To further illustrate the difference, if you disagree with what I’m saying here (it’s been known to happen), Townhall invites you to go to comments box and pound out a response which will remain tacked to the column, well, forever. But Townhall will not allow you (I hope) to hack into my column and erase entire paragraphs. That’s because this site respects the difference between a free exchange of opinion and an attempt to prevent other voices from being heard.
It’s wonderful to live in a free society. But as long as the Code Pink protesters want to shout everyone else down they aren’t encouraging free speech, they’re infringing upon it.
The organization’s message clearly isn’t strong enough to win many converts in an open debate. Too bad for them, but that’s their problem. If their arguments are that weak, maybe they ought to rethink them. Instead, they run around town disrupting others and generally behaving like a group of unsupervised kindergartners. No wonder they’re pitied, not powerful.