About 40 people protested last night outside the Carrier Dome, where filmmaker Michael Moore spoke to a sold-out crowd about politics and his distaste for President Bush.

The protesters, who stood in a small courtyard between the Physics Building and the Dome, hung Moore in effigy with a cardboard sign around his neck that said ‘Traitor.’ Many were students at colleges from around the state who traveled to Syracuse to protest the speech.

Thousands of students flooded the gates of the Dome, and many screamed profanities at the protesters. The Department of Public Safety set up road blocks around the designated protest area, and there were no physical conflicts between the protesters and the ticket holders.

‘We’re just trying to keep it orderly,’ said William Ferguson, deputy director of Public Safety. He said Public Safety asked the protesters not to heckle the crowd and hoped the crowd would do the same.

Members of the College Republicans at Binghamton University traveled here for the protest, as did seven members of the College Republicans at Wells College in Aurora, near Ithaca.

‘He’s a disgrace to the country,’ Kristylee Hochenberger, the chairwoman of the group at Wells, said of Moore. ‘He’s the last thing I would consider an American citizen.’

Meanwhile, a handful of demonstrators stood on the opposite side of a road block to protest against Bush and in favor of Moore.

The ticket holders ‘aren’t going to be swayed by these ideologues who are saying Moore is a traitor,’ said Patrick Chinnery, a graduate student at SU who protested against Bush’s social security policy.

The protesters’ signs said ‘Lying at the Dome’ and ‘Michael Moore for President, Paid for by al-Qaida,’ among a host of other anti-Moore and pro-Bush slogans. Several of the anti-Moore protesters said they had not watched Moore’s film, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ because they refused to pay for a ticket.

‘I don’t think you technically have to see the film. He hates America,’ said Sam Wengryn, a freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences.

Wengryn held a Bush-Cheney campaign poster and said he’d tried to get tickets to the speech but was too late. Wengryn said he hates Moore and accused him of ‘trying to make the Iraqi thing into a Vietnam.’

Unlike many of the other anti-Moore protesters, Wengryn stood alone and away from the line of demonstrators. His friends at Syracuse, he said, are more liberal than him.

‘They think it’s stupid,’ he said of the protest.

Moore’s speech drew a crowd of 10,000, but as ticket holders filed into the Dome, the protest seemed to attract an audience of its own. Angela Tucciarone, a sophomore political science and public relations major, didn’t have a ticket. She walked to the Dome because a friend had called her and piqued her interest in the protest.

‘I think it’s great. Syracuse needs this excitement,’ Tucciarone said. ‘Even for the football games, no one really cares.’