Vitriolic U.S. protesters speak out on the “climate of hate”

Code Pink gets mocked a lot for its unashamed eagerness to disrupt. Incidentally, they also get arrested a lot, too. Co-founder Medea Benjamin said she’s been arrested or detained in and around the Capitol “probably about 10 times.”…

“Under Bush, the first three years when [Congress] was Republican-controlled, they were pretty nice to us in the hearings,” Benjamin told TheDC. “I mean, they would come and ask us to stop doing this … but they wouldn’t have us arrested. They would just ask us to leave, which I think is the nicer way of doing things.

“I think we assumed that when the Democrats took over the Congress that they would be nicer to us. And it’s not the case. We’ve been arrest many times [in the past two years].”