We popped out of the SF Weekly offices to run into Safeway at Fourth and King streets this afternoon, when we noticed two overly cheerful young people staffing a Lyndon LaRouche table outside the grocery store.
Or, to be more precise, we noticed their sign, which featured President Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache across his upper lip.
Admittedly, we were curious to why these folks had descended upon a liberal bastion like San Francisco. So we stopped and chatted with the two young distinctly polite LaRouchePAC workers, both of whom didn't want to be named.
"We're shutting down programs to send manned satellites into space," explained her male compatriot.
The satellites, he said, could help us predict earthquakes, which was ever more important, "after what happened in Japan."
Obama, he continued, is "destroying what makes the human species unique from all other forms of life," and "condemning the human species" by failing to adequately prepare California, and the United States, for a large earthquake.
Building up steam, he said, Obama was failing to invest in research that would shed light on how the solar activity relates to tectonic activity.
"We know
there's a correlation, but we don't know what," he said.
So we had to ask: When is the big earthquake coming? "We don't know the exact date," the man admitted. But we kept pressing him, because, well, we want to know.
"Everyone
thinks it will happen in 2013," he finally said.
So then we brought the conversation full-circle and asked why a Hitler stache was scrawled across President Obama's photo? And why the calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, which deals with the succession of a
sitting U.S. President?
"We don't think Obama should be impeached," the young man explained. "We just think he should be removed."
While other LaRouche volunteers have reportedly been physically threatened after displaying similar signs comparing Obama to the genocidal German dictator, the young man said he's gotten a positive response from people passing through San Francisco's Mission Bay district.
"Everyone has been really nice so far," he said cheerfully. "Even people within the city."
Which makes sense when you think about it. San Francisco has adopted Frank Chu as its unofficial mascot, made the World Famous Bushman a tourist attraction, and bemusedly watches local nudists Lloyd and Rusty strut their stuff through the Castro.
If there's one thing we love, it's the blithely bizarre, no matter how offensive it might be.
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