Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: PETA protests disrupt Cash for Clunkers deals
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
August 11, 2009
News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
Just days after Congress replenished the federal 'cash for clunkers' program with another $2 billion in taxpayer funding, several car dealers around the nation reported that protesters from PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Automobiles -- have attacked and disrupted their attempts to close sales under the program.
PETA activists reportedly expressed their alarm at "the wanton destruction of the defenseless" by showing up at dealerships clothed in little more than bumper stickers and fuzzy dice, and by calling for a presidential pardon for some 750,000 operational vehicles that already face "annihilation by compression".
Police reports indicate some PETA members tossed cups of motor oil on customers, while others dramatized the brutality of car crushing using trash compactors and laboratory rats dressed as gas guzzlers.
At least one PETA member chained himself across the hood of a 1993 Buick Roadmaster, in a futile effort to prevent the dealer from injecting sodium silicate (liquid glass) into the station wagon's engine block.
Local police cuffed the protester, who watched with tears streaming down his cheeks as an auto technician raced the Buick's engine until it screamed, coughed up brown oil, then fell silent.
"The White House doesn't want you to see this part of the process," said an unnamed PETA spokesperson, who described himself as a 'classicarian'. "They focus on happy people driving shiny new cars, feeling good about how they're helping the environment. But on the dealer's back lot, it's a different story. These poor clunkers stand in the sun all day, row upon row, just waiting for the executioner."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "Unfortunately, in every war you have collateral damage."
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