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Saturday, March 22, 2003

posted by gbarto at 12:13 AM:

War Protesters Cost San Francisco Taxpayers Half a Million Dollars!

It may be just me, but these anti-war protesters are starting to look like real assholes to me. Today's San Francisco Chronicle was surprisingly unimpressed with the way the anti-war crowd wreaked havoc on their fair city. The ordinary workers who couldn't get to work to clock in or to their shops to open them weren't too happy either.

"You suck," motorist Larry Chu yelled from his car near the Transamerica Pyramid. "Why don't you all go to North Korea and do this?"...

"I'm definitely anti-war, but at the same time, we're trying to live our lives here," fumed Mark Thedis as he spent 30 minutes in his idling Range Rover in an alleyway off Folsom Street trying to get to work. "If they're trying to get people on their side, it's not working."

Computer systems administrator Owen Rowley was so furious he could barely spit out his words after having to struggle 20 blocks, on a mending broken ankle, from BART to his job on Union Street.

"These people have nothing better to do," he sputtered after finally arriving. "Those hippies blocked my bus. They made me walk on my bad leg. [He was recovering from a broken ankle.]

"This goes far beyond someone expressing their views on the war," [San Francisco City Supervisor Tony] Hall said, upset after being stuck in traffic for more than an hour at Market Street and watching two ambulances also struggle to move. "Look at what these people are doing. What has this got to do with the war?"

Maybe seeing kids who go to UC-Berkeley largely on the California taxpayer's dime deciding to take the day off to take a stand against you earning a living while their sensibilities are offended rankled. Nor is the cash-strapped city government, facing cutbacks in state matching funds under Boy Genius Gray Davis' proposed budgets happy at all the money it's spending on overtime.

It was a long day for protesters and police alike. Officers in riot gear hustled to keep up with roving bands of demonstrators. Roughly 1,500 of the Police Department's 2,300 officers were on street duty, officials said, costing the city $500,000 in police overtime.

But that's okay, because the activists are all very proud of the strong signal they're sending to Washington.

Kind of like the message they sent Secretary Rumsfeld when they trashed his properties in New Mexico:

We are arrogant jerks with no respect for other people, their time, their work or their property!

The arrogant attempts at moral superiority show only one thing: the total cluelessness of people who talk a great game about the poor, the struggling, the oppressed, but don't give a shit about anything but their own navel-gazing self-righteousness.

I can't find it now, but here's a paraphrase of my favorite comment from one angry commuter to a Chron reporter:

I wish that you'd publish the addresses of these people so me and my friends can go stand in their driveway tomorrow and not let them leave and see how they like it then.

By the way, here's the Chron on the second day of protests.