Bishop (D, NY) Town Hall report: wingtards present but outnumbered!

I knew this promised to be quite a show. Farmingville is a hotbed of right wing racism on Long Island on the best of days, and Bishop’s previous Town Hall in Setauket (held in June) dissolved into chaos thanks to the Freeptard presence. This was one of the reasons my husband The Martial Artist(tm) was also in attendance.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous when I didn’t see a single person I knew from Vets for Peace, IVAW or Code Pink anywhere in the 800 person, fully packed auditorium of Sachem Public High School tonight. I needn’t have worried. The angry looking tattooed skinheads and flag wavers in veteran regalia were strutting around, but for every one of them there were THREE people holding “We support Obama” signs.

Before the event began, freeptards planted throughout the room started chanting, well, whatever the heck they were chanting. I honestly couldn’t hear it because the Obama supporters started a counter chant, and the room (which already sounded like a sold out Led Zeppelin concert at Madison Square Garden) became a deafening cacaphony of unintelligible chanting. Signs were waving frantically over heads, the room went completely nuts for about 15 minutes.

Most awesome experience of the night: the supporters of health care reform – obviously present in larger numbers – started completely drowning out the wingnuts. Slowly, like an ocean of sound growing higher and higher and then crashing over the heads of everyone in the room, the louder chant became recognizable as…

“YES! WE! CAN! YES! WE! CAN! YES! WE! CAN! YES! WE! CAN!”

As my husband and I realized what was going on we added our pair of sergeant-like leatherlungs to this endeavor. What press were in the room were going crazy, running up and down the aisles trying to capture this. It was frickin’ beautiful.

This incident pretty much set the tone for the entire evening. The astroturfers weren’t going to have a prayer in hell tonight. Newsday falsely reported that the opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters, but those who were actually there know this is a blatant lie. There also were no buses in the parking lot for supposed “union imports”. Suffolk is a very large county and people are just going to have to understand that plenty of people in the unions actually do live in Bishop’s district, and they drive their own cars.

There were cards being distributed for people to ask questions, and most of the first were asked by opponents of health care reform. This was very clever, because it gave Bishop a chance to totally derail the agenda the wingnuts had to disrupt the meeting. It wasn’t like they weren’t getting their questions addressed, after all. They certainly didn’t LIKE the way a lot of the answers debunked the propaganda they’d been programmed with, but they couldn’t complain that they weren’t being allowed to ask their questions and GET the answers!

The freeptards sitting directly behind me were obsessed with screaming accusations at Bishop of not having read the bill. This was pretty stupid. Bishop (who is on the Health Care Committee) made several specific references to sections and pages of the bill, which an assistant would flash up on a screen at his request. He was quite well prepared for every question they threw at him.

The moderator was this lady who did a really good job, in general, of keeping people calm. She was trying very hard to be reasonable, but there are just some people in this world who are too stupid to reason with. “I’m Italian,” she said, “I know all about passions, but we need to be respectful” and she went on like that for a bit. So the racist bastard sitting behind me heckled her, “Oh, I know how to speak Italian!” and I whirled around and gave him my Brooklyn best – “Oh yeah? FANGOOL!” That shut HIM up for a while. ;-7

There was only one person who the freeptards managed to shout down from the podium, and that was a Mr. Mitchell, head of the Long Island Federation of Labor, who lived outside Bishop’s district. It seemed to be a big deal that people who got to ask the questions live in the district, but you’ll never see a Town Hall in NY 3, which is my district, because Parasite Petey King, like most Republitards, doesn’t give a flying sideways fuck about what his constituents think. It is not and it has never been my fault that Parasite Petey is my Congressman, I never voted for the bastard in my life. So if I want to see democracy in action I’ll go where I can see it, and anyone who doesn’t like that can kiss my sweet Brooklyn ass.

Anyway there was a short scuffle as the freeptards shouted down Mr. Mitchell, and immediately other union members began surrounding the man as he stood at the podium – not doing anything, just standing their passively with their arms down, but obviously shielding him with their bodies. They were about two feet deep around the guy before he decided to waive his question rather than allow this single disruption to continue. I was not able to see whether anyone got removed from the room during that single scuffle in the audience, but there were no other incidents. The video (by a freeptard) shows that a guy in an orange shirt in the audience started a fight which threatened to become physical with a union guy (in a red shirt) and was removed from the hall. Toward the end of this video you can see the other union folks shielding Mr. Mitchell with their bodies in case the freeptards jump him.

The event went on until 8:30pm and the crowd dispersed peacefully. There was a lot of freeptard chanting and mugging for the cameras outside, but most everyone else decided not to stay around for that.

So that was my big whoop-de-doo Town Hall experience this evening. I think it went well, overall. Didn’t bring the camera, so no pictures from me today, sorry.