Nice People

One thing people in New Hampshire seem to value is Nice. You hear that word all the time up here. So and so is nice, comes from a nice family and has a nice dog.

People in my town, Hampton, are especially nice to each other. Maybe it's because you see your neighbors, your fellow townspeople all the time, so if you cut them off on the road, or honk at them or snarl a lot, it becomes unpleasant because you are likely to run into that same person at the Hardware store or the bank or the Depot Square breakfast place or at Hagen's. 

Now we have elected two very nice people, a Congressman who can be nice and the ultimately sweet looking, nice lady Kelly Ayotte.

She is the mother of nice kids, the wife of a nice husband.

And she voted to kill the one program which provides medical care for every American citizen over the age of 65, so when they get sick, and they wind up in the hospital for their coronary bypass procedures and run up a bill of $120,000 in four days, they do not have to sell their house to pay for it, and they do not then have to move in with their kids.

Kelly wants to kill that program. Reform it is the nice way of putting it, but she voted to replace it with a coupon program, which is the same thing, kill it. Not nice to say you are killing. You are reforming. Or nicer yet, you are replacing it.  Let's all be nice.

Look at that face: Could this sweet,childlike face be attached to someone who is not nice?

Then again, she likes that Arizona Sheriff who marches prisoners down the street in their underwear. These prisoners, at least some of them, have not even been convicted of anything. Some were simply arrested. But there they are in their pink underwear in the hot Arizona sun being taunted by local Arizona citizens who have not yet been arrested. Ms. Ayotte had nothing but nice things to say about the Sheriff, when she showed up for an event honoring him.

I remember a scene from some movie about a concentration camp commandant, showing him petting his dog, showing him being really nice to his eight year old daughter. Kissing his wife good-bye when he went out the door to work in the morning. To work, to the concentration camp railroad platform, where he welcomed his new inmates.  To the gas chambers.

He was awfully nice, too.