“The vociferous minority.”
That's what former Laramie City Attorney Tom Smith called them, shaking his head.
Smith was referring to people who sometimes showed up at Laramie City Council meetings, mad as hell over some issue they often misunderstood.
As a wet-behind-the-ears reporter, I saw it happen.
In the wake of Rep. Harriet Hageman's raucous town hall meeting in Laramie two weeks ago, the late Tom Smith's words come to mind.
Except this time it was a vociferous MAJORITY, on steroids. Some in the crowd of around 500 at the Laramie Civic Center were screaming profanities at Hageman from the start, and giving our two-term representative the middle finger.
Secretary of State Chuck Gray was near the front and videoed two young women making a show of giving him the finger. Like Hageman, Gray has an uncanny ability to bring out the bat-guano crazy in some folks. Kind of like Donald Trump.
Even the Democrat chair for Albany County was “heart broken” by the shocking behavior, and said some in the audience did not appear to be local residents. That would be consistent with Sen. Chuck Schumer's admission that Democrats are being mobilized to disrupt Republican town hall meetings across the country.
Screamed profanities? Middle fingers? After decades in the news biz, I can't recall another time when public officials were subjected to that level of abuse.
And I witnessed my share of hot issues. In one city, a bid to bring a prison to town was hotly debated. In an advisory referendum, voters said no, but the city council went ahead anyway. Next election, the voters cleaned house. A Federal Bureau of Prisons official said the public comment file for that project was the fattest they'd seen.
And yet, we witnessed no screamed profanities. No middle fingers.
Property taxes can make veins pop out of necks, and school board meetings can get fiery. But I never saw middle fingers or heard profanities.
What happened in Laramie, in Rock Springs, and in Wheatland was out of the ordinary. Hageman said the crowd in Laramie was “too immature to have a dialog.” A woman in Wheatland was seen on a national broadcast yelling at Hageman, and had to be separated from Hageman's staff after the meeting broke up.
I guess this is to be expected as Democrat hair is on fire all over the country. Their party flops around like a slippery, defiant walleye in the bottom of the boat. They're leaderless, immature, and now sprinkling their ravings with F-words. And so far, no responsible adult has emerged to extinguish their hair, hose them down, and tell us what they stand for besides hating Donald Trump.
They hate Trump so much that they even oppose efforts to cut the massive waste, fraud and inefficiencies exposed by Elon Musk. To the point where Musk's Tesla electric vehicles are being torched and his showrooms shot up. And the clown governor of Minnesota – fresh off his defeat for vice president - celebrates the decline of Tesla stock, mocking a leading American car maker.
Did you ever think we'd see such insanity directed at people trying to save a country that is $36 trillion in debt?
Me either.
With every report of another shameful waste of taxpayer money on goofball projects around the world, I think of the old Ace hit, “How Long (Has This Been Going On?)”
I think the medical term for what we're seeing is “mass hysteria.” Furious crazies like those at the Laramie town hall are showing up at events around the country.
The worst possible outcome would be the crazies getting their way, our country missing this golden opportunity, and returning to the oblivious, ruinous, spendthrift ways of recent decades, selfishly heaping even more debt on our kids and grandkids.
Meanwhile, Hageman has switched her town hall format to video. A thousand people participated in Cheyenne Friday evening, with no fireworks.
Citing the behavior of recent crowds, Hageman explained the new video format with words sometimes heard around our house when the kids were growing up:
“This is why we can't have nice things.”
Hageman's tough. She endured 45 minutes of madness in Laramie, alone on stage.
She's exactly the determined representative we need in Washington to support this long-overdue federal house cleaning.
Go Harriet.
