Three women and two men — one guy 82-years-old — donned bright yellow chicken suits and roosted on a sidewalk outside First District Rep. James Comer’s Paducah field office on Thursday. The idea was to shame him into hosting a town hall.
Comer was elsewhere. But the protest ruffled his feathers.
A savvy politician would have responded with something like “everybody has a right to protest” or maybe joked about the chicken costumes.
Instead, Comer had staffers bat out a three-sentence statement that concluded, “Congressman Comer does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
“A hit dog hollers” is an old Kentucky expression denoting that a comment apparently hit home. There’s also “madder than a wet hen.” Both seemed appropriate for Comer’s chicken-you-know-what comment.
“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, famously advised on the topic of political discourse. But that party of “Lincoln and Liberty” is long gone. The MAGA-Musk-Trump-Comer GOP looks more like a party of Jeff Davis.
Anyway, the protestors, most of them from the local Four Rivers Indivisible group, think Comer owes his constituents a face-to-face town hall meeting. Evidently others do, too. Several motorists honked their horns, smiled, and flashed thumbs-up as they drove past the chickens, who joined the others in waving signs. (One chicken had a sign ID-ing himself as Comer.)
The protest made national news after WPSD, the local TV station, ran the story. A Washington-based reporter phoned Four Rivers co-leader Leslie McColgin and asked her about Comer’s condescending crack. She opted for the high road response, though I’d have been tempted to suggest that Comer might need some anger management therapy.
“These aren’t people that are asking for therapy,” McColgin told Erin Kelly of Spectrum News 1. “These are people that are asking for government services, and that’s his job, to have town halls and explain his position on policies such as Medicaid, such as the oversight of how they’re dismantling Social Security.”
McColgin told Forward Kentucky that her group includes “people from all walks of life, including four local Christian ministers, active or retired. Many of us believe we are in a moral crisis in our country, with the forces of corruption and greed seeking to divide us. Whether we are Christian or of some other faith, or no faith, these faith leaders in our group speaking up, showing up at our protests, and being willing to help lead us to moral clarity on what we are facing should be respected, not demonized as Rep. Comer did.”
Before the protest, Four Rivers, a branch of the national Indivisible organization, issued a statement explaining that “Local citizens have been visiting Rep. James Comer’s Paducah field office weekly in February and March. They have expressed questions and concerns to the staffer there, Austin Wetherington, who has taken questions privately from small groups of 2-3 in his office, but no photos or recordings are allowed. He reports that he shares the comments with Rep Comer, but we have no immediate feedback or response, and the general public misses out on the valuable venue of a traditional Town Hall format. We have asked each week if or when Rep. Comer will hold a town hall in Paducah, but each time have been told there is no plan for one.”
The first two sentences in the Comer statement promised “Congressman Comer and his staff are always accessible and encourage constituents in Kentucky’s 1st District to contact our offices with any federal issues they may be experiencing. The second one said, “The protestors outside of the Paducah office have met with the Congressman’s staff on 4 different occasions and their concerns are documented.”
Translation: hogs will fly and kids will stop shooting hoops in Kentucky before Comer hosts a town hall.
Comer’s gratuitous jab at constituents exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed (so far anyway) free-speech rights has heaped more embarrassment on his already embarrassing tenure in Congress. “Comer, a Republican from Frankfort or Tompkinsville or wherever he claims to reside these days, is not only an embarrassment to Kentucky, he has managed, from his spot as chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, to drench himself in shame from Maine to California,” wrote Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist Bill Straub last September.
Added the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer: “Now, we’ve had a lot of fun with this dope for the past three-and-a-half years as he gorged on self-importance, pursuing a laughable impeachment inquiry into President Biden that attracted nothing but ridicule, and deservedly so. He was belittled throughout the process, which went nowhere, emerging as a walking, talking punchline.
“But the joke doesn’t end there. With the election heating up, Comer has opted to transform his congressional panel into an arm of the Republican National Committee. And he doesn’t even have the good sense to try and hide it.”
Thursday’s hour-long protest was supposed to be the last one in a series that started in February. Perhaps spurred by the chicken-suited quintet, it was the largest protest, with close to three dozen people dropping by at one time or another.
McColgin warned that Comer is wrong if he thinks his trash talk has scared off the Four Rivers faithful. “This is our last planned event until after the Hands Off mass mobilization day of April 5th,” she said. “After that, he can expect to see us show up as needed in response to events. We are not going away. We may not be back with chicken suits, but we will return to keep holding him accountable to his constituents.”
Four of the chicken suits were rentals that had to be returned. So the Four Rivers folks still have one suit and a stack of homemade signs, some of which depict the congressman’s scowling face stuck on a clucking chicken. “Do Your Job, Jamie! YOUR FLOCK IS WAITING, AND WE ARE IN A FOWL MOOD!” the sign says.
After Comer’s supercilious slam, “FOWL” might be changed to “MORE FOWL THAN EVER.”
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