A heated two-hour discussion described as a “bloody knife fight.” Four different resolutions, three with neck-and-neck votes. A screaming match with the lines “You’re the meanest man I’ve ever met!” and “You need to see your therapist!”

Was “House of Cards” filmed in San Francisco the other night? No, it was just another meeting of the Democratic County Central Committee, the strange little political group that can turn the simplest of requests into all-out warfare.

As described in Tuesday’s column, the Robert F. Kennedy Democratic Club wanted to change its name to the United Democratic Club after the Kennedy family asked it to and because it wanted to distance itself from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who believes in the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and is working with President Trump on the issue.

It’s just a name change. No biggie, right? Folks, this is San Francisco politics. Everything is a big deal.

The discussion at the DCCC meeting took more than two hours. Supervisor Aaron Peskin doesn’t like the club because it took more than $900,000 from tech and real estate groups to support moderate candidates and measures in November’s election.

Peskin, a DCCC member, introduced three resolutions: to require that DCCC member Tom Hsieh recuse himself from the vote since he was paid by the club to produce its mail, to require the club be chartered as an entirely new group rather than just renamed and to postpone the issue until April. All of them failed narrowly.

A resolution to allow the group to rename itself finally passed by a vote of 22-4. Peskin, Supervisor Sandra Fewer, Bevan Dufty and Rafael Mandelman opposed it. And so the group is officially the United Democratic Club.

But the drama wasn’t over. Moderate DCCC member Kat Anderson was sitting next to Peskin throughout the night and said he kept sniping at her under his breath. She said toward the end of the long discussion, she proposed ending the meeting, but then regretted the motion and withdrew it.

“He said, ‘You’re so stupid,’” Anderson said of Peskin. “I stood up and looked over at him and said, ‘You are a mean man. You’re the meanest man I ever met! I cannot believe you represent the people of San Francisco!’

“He looked stunned, and he goes, ‘You’re imbalanced,’ which I think is tantamount to calling a woman hysterical,” she continued. “He said, ‘You need to see your therapist.’ I said, ‘You need to see your therapist!’”

Only in San Francisco would the pinnacle of a yelling match not end in “Let’s take this outside” but “You need to see your therapist!” (Disclosure: Anderson is the administrative officer/business agent for the Pacific Media Workers Guild, of which I am a member.)

Peskin, probably wisely, declined to comment on the dustup with Anderson.

More to the point: People, there is a man who really does need to see his therapist running this country. This week alone, he changed deportation rules to allow far more undocumented immigrants to be deported and waded into the controversial matter of which bathrooms transgender students can use.

These issues are near and dear to San Franciscans, and you’re spending 200 hours (two hours times the number of DCCC members and United Democratic Club members in attendance) on a name change?

Peskin defended his unsuccessful quest to block the change, saying the club “played fast and loose” with its mailers, not fully identifying where its money to pay for them came from.

“If we can’t reform that kind of behavior in San Francisco, where we’re always ahead of the game, we’ll never be able to reform those things at the state and national level,” he said. “We all decry the Koch brothers, and it’s happening locally.”

Justin Jones, the renamed club’s co-founder, said the brouhaha was “a bloody knife fight” and “a huge distraction” that irked the group’s more than 350 members.

“This is very indicative of why people don’t like politics, and they don’t want to get involved,” he said. “This is a time when we should all be united against our common threat.”

Rachel Norton, a member of the DCCC, the school board and the United Democratic Club, said she didn’t get why the club was targeted.

“They’re young, new San Francisco residents who really want to be engaged in politics,” she said. “Isn’t that what we want?”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?

One of my favorite parts of writing a column is hearing from readers with interesting stories of their own.

Ron Johnson, a Walnut Creek resident, was moved by the column about Dr. Peggy Knudson, a trauma surgeon at San Francisco General Hospital, who saved the life of a 6-year-old boy who had been crushed by falling furniture.

Johnson could relate. His own son, Robert, was saved by Knudson in 2011. Robert, 26 at the time, tripped and fell through the plate glass window of a San Francisco hotel room, landing four stories below. He suffered a lacerated liver, a broken pelvis, a bruised kidney and multiple shattered bones.

Ron Johnson said his son is now working as an archaeologist, surfs every day and got married last fall, none of which would have happened without, as the family calls her, “Dr. K.”

“Every day, we give thanks that Dr. K was in the hospital at that time,” he said. “We were so blessed to have him survive.”

Also enjoyed hearing from Catherine Brady, who splits her time between Oakland and a cattle ranch in the Sierra foothills. She got a kick out of reading that state Sen. Scott Wiener is a member of the Legislature’s Gay Boy Caucus.

When her father, Bernard Brady, was in the Legislature decades ago, her mother was one of many politicians’ wives who called themselves the Poor and Lonely Souls, or PALS. They attended luncheons and compiled a cookbook, not exactly the same social activities shared by the Gay Boys Caucus.

Despite belonging to the retro-sounding PALS, her mother, Margaret Brady, seems to have been ahead of her time. In 1977, Mayor George Moscone named her director of San Francisco’s parking authority, the first female department head in city history.

Many readers asked after the column on the glorious City Hall lights how they can find out what the various color schemes mean. The City Administrator’s Office has come up with an answer: Twitter.

Follow the new Twitter handle, @sfcityhallevent, for updates. Its first reported color scheme was easy to guess: red, white and blue earlier this week for Presidents Day.

Thursday’s lights were red, green and black, the colors of the Pan-African flag, for the annual Black History Month celebration.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Tuesday and Friday. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com, Twitter: @hknightsf