CodePink falsely claimed Marine recruitment center was leaving town
CodePink gets the award for Best Movement Joke Played On Government for April Fools’ Day. Apparently it was announced that the embattled Berkeley Marine Corps Recruitment Center was leaving town. Seems it was all an April Fools’ Day joke — by CodePink, the peace group that has sponsored the fight against the recruiters. I enjoyed it. Maybe you will, too. However, the writer of the following article from the San Mateo County Times’ InsideBayArea.com did not approve.
By Kristin Bender
BERKELEY _ CodePink should be turning red.
That seems to be the consensus of many who were on the receiving end of a bogus announcement Tuesday by the radical anti-war group that the embattled U.S. Marine Corps recruiting center in Berkeley was caving to the pressure of weekly protests and leaving town. “If you want to be taken seriously as an organization of serious protest, then you don’t play jokes _ even on April Fools’ Day,” said Robin Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written about the politics of language.
CodePink and other anti-war groups have been protesting the U.S. Marine recruiting center in downtown Berkeley for months, hoping to force the recruiters to leave town.
A CodePink official defended the hoax Tuesday. “In CodePink we tend to have a sense of humor,” said CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin. “We tend to joke about a lot of things. It keeps us going where other anti-war groups have gone by the wayside.” [For the rest of the article, go here.]
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