A crowd of protesters had gathered on the sidewalk outside the building where I work. They chanted and yelled and sang songs.

This isn`t an uncommon occurrence. Various groups occasionally come downtown to demonstrate in support of or opposition to one cause or another.

Because such expressions of free speech are legal, I respect their right to do so, even though listening to them can be a pain in the ear.

While this particular group set up its din, a coworker, who had just come into the building, stopped by to talk.

I asked him who the demonstrators were.

“The LaRouchies,“ he said. “They`re all upset because LaRouche is

going to prison.“I immediately went to a window that overlooked the street, opened it and bellowed:

“Shut your (deleted) mouths, you stupid (deleteds.) I hope that (deleted) rots in jail.“

I leave the deleted words to your imagination.

Someone has since informed me that it is the policy of this newspaper that employees not lean out of windows and shout obscenities at demonstrators or anyone else. This is a class joint.

So I won`t do it again. But that one time, I couldn`t resist it. The joy of the occasion simply overwhelmed me.

As you may have read, Lyndon LaRouche has been sentenced to 15 years in
prison. And six of his followers got prison terms ranging from two to five years.

This has made all the LaRouchies miserable and unhappy. And anything that makes them unhappy makes my day.

If there is one group of political nasties that I loathe, it is the LaRouchies. I began tangling with them at least 10 years ago, back before they became well known as a public nuisance.

I wrote about their scams and cons, using legitimate issues such as drugs and nuclear war to play on the fears of gullible people, hustle them for money, and pump the funds to LaRouche so he could live like a king and indulge his fantasy of being a major international political force.

They didn`t like seeing their scams exposed. Nor did they like reading facts about their leader, LaRouche, and themselves.

For example, it upset them whenever I wrote that LaRouche and many of his original followers used to be Communists. LaRouche was a vocal defender of Joe Stalin and his methods.

But for a variety of reasons, one of which was that you can`t make a very good buck being a Stalinist, LaRouche and his top people switched political
gears and became sort of a hodgepodge right-wing cult. It`s still hard to
categorize his beliefs because most are bizarre if not outright nuts.

One thing that didn`t change, though, were LaRouche`s methods for keeping his followers in line. He and his top people still believed in the Stalinist
approach. They demanded total, mindless obedience. They brainwashed, bullied
and intimidated the mentally troubled misfits who gravitated to their cult.

And they used them to raise money for themselves and LaRouche.

But their methods finally caught up with them. The government gathered
evidence that they had bilked people out of more than $30 million in loans
they never intended to repay.

And they nailed LaRouche for claiming he had no taxable income despite living on a huge estate with servants. His expenses were all paid by corporations he set up.

But what I dislike most about the LaRouchies is that they have bumped off cats.

I`m not a great cat lover, although I provide food and shelter for two of them. However, I think it is cowardly to murder them.

And that`s what LaRouchies did. When a reporter in New England wrote about some of their antics, they killed several of his cats. The killings didn`t stop until his articles did.

Later, when I wrote something about them, they sent a cat death threat to the young female reporter who was my assistant.

I figured that anybody who threatens cats is basically a coward and a

wimp. So I phoned the LaRouchie office here and said that if they threatened harm to any more cats, I would come there with some large, violent friends and we would break their furniture, their legs, and maybe a few fingers and noses, and jump up and down on their chests.

They shouted and sputtered that those would be criminal acts. I agreed but said we`d do it anyway and take a chance on getting a cat-loving jury. And that was the last I heard from the creeps.

I don`t know which prison LaRouche and his associates will be sent to.