California Recall: Georgy Russell Protests (?) at Schwarzenegger Rally

Georgy Russell

Georgy Russell, as in Georgy for Governor, claims she handled rather aggressively by Schwarzenegger supporters at an Arnold rally in Pleasanton, CA on Saturday:

Gubernatorial candidate Georgy Russell was pushed, shoved, hit and kicked yesterday by supporters of Arnold Schwarzenegger at a rally in Pleasanton CA. She was repeatedly called a "bitch" and one of the Arnold Supporters wrote on her clothing with a permanent marking pen. The felonious abusers, who claimed to be provoked by remarks from Russell, were near equal numbers of men and women and no one during the incident came to Russell's aid. Schwarzeneggar and his wife Maria Shriver witnessed the attack and neither said or did anything to stop the abuse.

I've been on both sides of scenes like that (although I don't recall ever being physically attacked). My local Catholic parish a few years ago invited an elderly Jewish Auschwitz survivor to speak to the church youth group. The event was open to the public, and several 50-ish neo-Nazis showed up and basically tried to heckle him down. The adults from the church shouted them down, and they shut up and let the speaker continue.

They tried some heckling afterward, but eventually left the hall. They stayed outside arguing and shouting, until someone finally called the police. The representatives of the Master Race then scurried away before having to explain themselves to the local cops.

Now, my feeling in that case was that, dammit, if our Catholic parish wants to invite a Jew to talk to us about the Holocaust, we're gonna do it! And these guys were obviously a bunch of cheap bullies, trying to initimidate an old man. It would take a better Christian than I to think that they didn't deserve to be soundly thrashed.

But that's not what happened. We shut them up without having to push them around. And, even though it wasn't intended by the organizers, the kids wound up not just hearing a lesson about a long-distant case of hatred getting out of hand. They were seeing the same hatred played out in front of them.

But at a political rally, if Schwarzenegger isn't man enough to handle a lone 20-something female heckler (and thatassumes shewas even heckling) - or if his supporters can't do a little counter-heckling without getting physical, well, that's just pathetic.

Tags: authoritarianism, california politics, georgy russell, recall campaign, republican party, schwarzenegger