Journalism 101

 

There was voting in Hampton yesterday, and about 10,000 ballots were cast, although with the ballot running into what felt like 100 pages, not all voters voted on every warrant article. Mad Dog typically skips the warrant article yes/no vote on allowing Mrs. Moneypenny to plant petunias across the sidewalk on the grassy strip by the road which technically belongs to the town, for which she needs voter permission to plant. Live Free or Die, New Hampshire.

Among the warrant articles to go down to defeat was the article awarding $52,000 to the Sacred Heart School of the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.   During the Deliberative Session on this article the woman who writes the checks to cover the invoices presented her from the school for computers admitted she had no idea whether those computers were used to stream services from St. Patrick's cathedral. 

That question arose because the argument has always been that none of this taxpayer money ever goes to buy crucifixes or Bibles, but is only used for "non religious purposes," as if you can separate the peanuts in the stew from the tomatoes, so it's safe to dip in your spoon, even if you're allergic to peanuts.

But what is really fun is to see is how the reporter for the Seacoast News, Max Sullivan, who has reported on this warrant article for years, wrote about this defeat.

 Sullivan's previous stories about this warrant articles featured quotes from the principal of Sacred Heart, along with a photograph of her standing in front of some poster with an inspirational message, like "It's All About the Kids!" Nowhere in his paragraph are responses from any of the opponents of the article. Well, saying "any of the opponents" may be a bit of a reach, as there has only ever been one opponent to speak against the warrant article, (until this year when a public school teacher expressed doubts, without fully opposing it.) But Sullivan has never interviewed this rowdy opponent, which prompted the malcontent to question the owner of Seacoast News whether Sullivan was a member of the congregation, which the owner heatedly denied.

Here is Mr. Sullivan's rendition:

"Voters have supported funding under RSA 198:49 to the Catholic school each year since 1975. The state law was created to allow non-public schools the means of attaining education resources normally provide to public schools by the state. None of the funds are used for religious purposes and are directly used to benefit the students of Hampton who attend the school. The article which was not recommended by the School Board or the Budget Committee was defeated by a vote of 1,345 to 1,961."

Of course there are things to unpack here:

1/ None of the funds are used for religious purposes we've covered: school funds are not fungible, i.e. if you pay for paving the parking lot, the church school has more money to spend on the altar.

2/ The article was not recommend by the School Board or the Budget Committee: In previous years the School Board was stacked with members of the congregation of the Church, and so they were voting taxpayer funds to support their own church. This year, the Board is not so overwhelmed by church people, and at the Deliberative Session there was much ire coming from congregants about the Board's change of heart. For years, the congregants thought it was just fine to have the recommendations of the School Board printed on the ballot; this year there was prolonged objection.

3/ The RSA is the law which has been used to circumvent the state constitution which clearly states no citizen's taxes can ever be allocated to any church or religious organization, a provision which has suffered local nullification since 1975. Here's the actual constitutional passage: "No money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools of institutions of any religious sect or denomination." That passage is so clear that efforts have been made to expunge it in the legislature. Not a problem in Hampton, where we simply ignore it.

 

4/ The $52,000 is used to benefit the students from Hampton who attend the school, but only 25% of the students are from homes in Hampton, which means 75% of the students benefited are from households where the parents are paying taxes in another town. As was noted at the Deliberative Session, what this article has guaranteed is not equal treatment for all Hampton kids, it has guaranteed that anyone from neighboring towns who want their kids to have a Catholic education can send there kids to Hampton, where the taxpayers will pay for it. Mr. Sullivan echoes the words of the Sacred Heart principal who frequently uses that phrase: funds "are directly used to benefit students of Hampton who attend the school." True enough, but there are precious few of those attending the school and the funds are Hampton taxes supporting kids from towns which are not Hampton.

And, oh, Mr. Sullivan has never addressed the question about  the woman who has  written those checks to cover Sacred Heart invoices for so many years: Is she herself a graduate of Sacred Heart?  Is  this town official, who has been writing checks from taxpayer funds all these years, never having refused to pay an invoice from the school, actually writing taxpayer checks to her own alma mater?

So, some significant points have been missed by Mr. Sullivan. 

When he was challenged about why he never interviewed the rowdy article opponent, Mr. Sullivan replied he had tried to call that man but never got an answer, and he was writing under deadline. The opponent asserted his phone showed no such phone  call, and no message was left. 

There you have the essence of journalism along the Seacoast. 

Some have decried the death of local newspapers. 

Mad Dog wonders whether we are better off without them.

Washington Posting

When I was seven  years old, my brother who was five years older got a newspaper route delivering the "Evening Star," and I became his employee. I was not old enough to get a paper route, but he paid me $3 a month for delivering half the route, and it was my first introduction to newspapers and the idea of their importance. In those days, most people in our neighborhood got a morning paper (The Washington Post) and an evening paper, the Star. 

I read both papers, although selectively, beginning with Dick Tracey and the other comics, and scanning the headlines about stories I did not fully understand, like those about a Senator named Joseph McCarthy and communists infiltrating the government.

Years later, when I moved back to Washington, D.C., we had friends who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and were in the journalist crowd.  There were lots of dinner parties in those days--that's what you did in Washington-- and I found myself sitting next to Annie Garrels, the NPR correspondent who covered Moscow, who asked me what I did and when I told her I was a doctor, she said, "Oh, don't say you regret that, and that medicine in America is cooked."

"Actually," I told her. "I feel very lucky to be able to do what I do."

"Good then," she said, "You'll do."

She engaged in a brief exchange in Russian with Tim Sebastian, across the table, who was a BBC correspondent in Washington, but he had lived for years in Moscow and spoke fluent Russian. Tim and I became friends and he was constantly remarking at something I had said, "Oh, God. That is just so American."

I used to run a lot--sixty miles a week--and Tim said, "Oh, you Americans! You think death is optional."

"What?"

"You think if you exercise enough and eat right, you'll live forever. Brits know we are all cooked."

"Oh, well Brits, I'm sure are cooked. I'm going to live forever."

The journalists were fun, and this group was bright. I met plenty of newspaper reporters in Washington who were, simply put, not very bright. Magazine editors, too. Just this side of really dim. But, there were a score of fun, bright journalists who were good at asking the right questions, but somehow, something about them bothered me, as a group, a culture.

Their knowledge was, as a rule, superficial. They could get into a story and learn a lot by asking questions, but they were only as good as their sources. If you guided them to the right people, they might get deep into a story, close to the truth, but they were just as likely to get deflected in the wrong direction, and they did not know their subject well enough to know when they were talking to the wrong people. They were like the proverbial medical intern. The old saying there was, "It's not the intern who doesn't know you have to worry about. It's the intern who doesn't know he doesn't know. That's the guy who ought to terrify you."

I could see this in the stories they did about medicine, and I realized they were just operating in a different world.  I would go to conferences and listen to people argue about minutiae for hours, but out of that crawled the truth and you knew how tentative that truth was. For the journalists, who wrote on a deadline, this was simply not what they did. They were always in a hurry. They were always certain. They had their stories and they were sticking to them.

On the other hand, they could surprise you. At lunch with an editor of the Washingtonian magazine, I asked him who he liked for President. This was in 2007. This editor was from Mississippi, a graduate of Princeton. He was one of those men who knew what people thought of Mississippi and he knew what people thought of guys from Mississippi who went to Princeton. He was self aware, and self effacing and I liked him and he was one of the smarter journalists I knew. He knew the world is not a perfect place. Anyone who grew up in Mississippi knew that. And he said, "I kinda like the chances of this fellow  Obama."

I nearly fell out of my chair.  I had seen Obama on T.V. I had seen him schmoozing at the Iowa pig roast, and I had stopped channel surfing to watch him and I said, "I'll change the channel the instant he gets boring." I listened to him for half an hour. 

"I'm talking about someone who has a snowball's chance," I said. "Someone who does not come out of the gate already down by ten Southern states." 

"Well," he said, "Every Democrat is in that position. Obama's no worse off in the South than any Democrat. Ain't nobody going to win in Richard Nixon's Southern tier. But, I think Obama can do better in the toss up states. He's the genuine article."

Later, I thought back on that conversation and I thought, maybe these journalists, if they talk to enough people, they actually learn something I don't know.

Now, however, I hear Mr. Bezos wants his editorial page to embrace personal liberties and free markets, whatever that means. Well, I know at least partly what it means. The owner wants his paper to embrace his own values, and to not offend the current Republican mob in Washington.

Which is not to say there hasn't been a prescribed formula at the Post when it was run by people who believed deeply in diversity, inclusiveness and equity.

And one might ask, why does any paper feel it is the place of a newspaper to endorse any candidate for President of the United States?  Where did that imperative come from?

Jefferson said if he had to choose between a state which had government and no newspapers or a country with no government but had newspapers, he would choose the newspaper state. 

William Randolph Hearst gave us the Spanish American War, manifest destiny and the American Empire. When he sent his man to Havana he told him to get him some photos showing the Spanish sunk the Maine and did it to provoke war. The reporter said he might get some photos but he wasn't sure he could find the connection to war, and Hearst replied: You give me the photos; I'll give you the war.

And he did.

Now we have a President who wants to sue newspapers into oblivion. Freedom of speech is just another thing to sue into oblivion. Newspapers are the enemy of the people.

At their best, journalists allow us to Aude Alteram Partum: Hear the other side. 

Obadiah Youngblood, Lock 8, C&O Canal

Currently, there is so much coming at them, I'm not sure journalists can keep up. 

Tariffs beget consequences and the stock market crashes and it's all Biden's fault, although it's just a transition to a new free market economy which will make everyone on rich. Ukraine started the war. Good tariffs make good neighbors. Putin loves you and Zelensky is a dictator.

So, there you have it: There's still a place for speaking truth to power--until power sues you out of existence.

Letter From New Hampshire

 

Hampton, is one of the five towns which dot the 18 mile stretch of seacoast belonging to New Hampshire. The southernmost is Seabrook, then Hampton, North Hampton, Rye and finally Portsmouth, in roughly ascending order of wealth and political liberalism.

On the night of November 7, 2008, I watched the election results on the downstairs T.V. in our Hampton home, while my wife took to bed upstairs, pulled a pillow over her head so her ears were firmly plugged and refused to get up, even as I ran upstairs with bulletins from the TV election night news, threw open the door and shouted, "Looks promising!" and later "Looking good!" and finally, "He won!"

She refused to leave her room despite my exhortations--Obama was coming out to speak in Grant Park but she was sure he would be shot and, in any case it could not be true.

Ophrah Winfrey was weeping on TV, but she was not alone, as members of the Hampton Democrat Committee were gathered in front of a TV in the home of its chairman about a mile from my house,  and they were weeping copious tears of joy. 

Ten miles up the Coast, in Portsmouth, the Leftist Marching Band (real name) took to the streets and played "Happy Days Are Here Again!" and various other celebrations deep into the night. There was dancing in Market Square, on Bow Street at Tugboat Alley,  and in front of North Church and inside the liberal Universalist/Unitarian (U-U) Church ("Don't believe in God? Don't be a Stranger. There's a Place Here for You.")

Up the Piscataqua River, and on to the Great Bay and Oyster river near Durham, home to the University of New Hampshire and on north to Dover, the rejoicing was loud and long.

New Hampshire, like so many states, is those liberal towns with Alabama in between. While there was celebration north of Hampton, south of Hampton, in Seabrook, there was deep dejection. (Years later, Seabrook celebrated Trump's wins with fireworks.)

I had moved to New Hampshire in 2008, and was quickly recruited to hold an Obama sign at the main intersection in town, finding myself standing next to a seventy something woman in a blue wool Talbot's suit, white hair perfectly coiffed, and learning I was new to town and hailed from below the Mason/Dixon line, she said, "Well, you'll find Republicans up here are more refined. You'll disagree with them about things like taxes and real estate development, but then you can eat lunch with them at the Old Salt and talk about the Winnacunnet football team."

Not more than five seconds after she said that, a man leaning out of the passenger window of a Ford F150 gave us the middle finger and shouted, "Nigger lover!" as the truck roared off.

Redux of 2008, four years later

This did not surprise me much, as I had driven up to the lakes region the week before and saw a big lawn sign, "Somewhere In Kenya, A Village Is Missing Its Idiot." My Talbot lady might have been harboring a nostalgia for a time long gone.

On the other hand, maybe that part of New Hampshire had always been there, and thinking about the dark secret of "Peyton Place," the real shameful secret had nothing to do with all the subterranean sex but with the founding of the town, which the white folks living there in the 1950's could not abide: The town's founder and benefactor was a Black man, an escaped slave. (And remember "Peyton Place" was published before "To Kill A Mockingbird.") It does seem still true that you don't hear much racial animus expressed in New Hampshire, but that may be because there are so few Blacks the topic of race rarely comes up.

When there was the Pease Air Force base at Portsmouth, there were more Black students at Portsmouth High School and teachers who were there then say that infused the experience of high school with a "broadening" of perspective, but that hasn't been seen since the base closed in 1991. Now you don't see many Black faces in New Hampshire. My wife, who kept her Washington, D.C. job for the first five years we lived in New Hampshire would fly down to DC every six weeks to work in the office and she said, "I'd see a Black man on the Metro and just beam at him, and he'd slide away from me, down the seating toward a far end of the car, thinking I was some sort of nut. But it was just nice to see some people who are not so...White."

It's not that New Hampshire has always been insulated from the greater issues of the country. In 1968, North Hampton's Peter Fuller bred a wonderful horse, Dancers Image, and when he won a stakes race on the way to the Kentucky Derby, and he gave his winnings to Coretta Scott King after her husband was assassinated. When Dancers Image won the Kentucky Derby the Derby officials were apoplectic. This Yankee commie, who gave his winnings to Martin Luther King's widow, wins the Kentucky Derby!  Somehow, weeks later the Derby hoo-haws discovered a banned substance in the horse's urine, and stripped away the title but everyone knew what had happened and why, even in New Hampshire. 

When Donald Trump won, in 2016, the New Hampshire Democrats decided to hold seminars to draw together folks to talk about what values we thought ought to bind Democrats together, and I drove over to the library where it was happening with Mary McCarthy, a longtime officer in the Democratic Committee. She had taken me canvassing, knocking on doors, to try to turn out the Democratic vote, and like so many politically active New Hampshire residents, she had met all the big names who came through New Hampshire for primary season year after year.  

The joke was you would never consider voting for someone if  they'd been over to your kitchen for coffee only once.  Joe Biden had shaken Mary's hand for a long time, staring into her azure blue eyes and he said, "I see a lot of people on these grip and grin lines, but those eyes are really gorgeous."

But now we were seated around a table in the Exeter Library to talk about the direction we wanted to see the Democratic Party go.  The Party felt it important to provide us with a facilitator, who began the discussion by asking each person to say something about what we might need to know to prepare for the next election. A sixty-something woman I'd never met held a textbook she had filched from her grand daughter, and when her turn came, she opened the book and briefly reviewed her notes and informed us she had learned that the federal government has three branches. 

My mouth dropped open, and almost instantaneously, a stinging pain in my left shin, Mary having kicked me, seeing my mouth open, and she was sure I was about to say something she knew would be inappropriate. She narrowed the gorgeous blue beamers at me and I held my tongue.

Obadiah Youngblood, Pink House

Afterwards, as we were driving home, she asked me, "What would be the point of humiliating that woman?"

"That woman graduated from  Winnacunet High School. Granted, 40 years ago, but she is a product of the New Hampshire public schools," I protested.

"And my son, who also graduated from Winnacunnet, would know all about the three branches."

"Are you sure?"

That elicited a shoulder thump. Blue eyes aside, Mary has a pretty potent right cross. 

The next year, Mary took me to a meeting where candidates for an open U.S. Congressional seat were speaking.  The deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had already happened, and Trump had commented there were very fine people on both sides of that nasty event.  

Terence O'Rourke: Opportunity Missed

"I'm looking for that woman," I told Mary, as we settled into our seats. "You think she knows which branch of the government these folks are running for?"

Another right shoulder thump. Some back and forth about public schools, and we were getting smug and catty about a couple wearing cowboy hats two rows in front of us, which is simply not done in New Hampshire, when I heard, filtering through from the podium, "We live in divided times. But even in these times, I would have thought one thing we could all agree upon is that there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi."

"Wait! Who is this guy?"

He was a lawyer named Terence O'Rourke and he continued on saying, "We always get warnings from the Republicans about socialized medicine, but I grew up in a military family and we had Army medicine, which is socialized medicine and my father still gets VA medicine, which is government medicine. And I can't think of any better medicine in the world."

I invited O'Rourke to do a house meeting at my house, a local custom,  where he fielded questions from about forty local Hampton citizens filling seats spread out from my fireplace across the first floor. We learned he had fought in Iraq as an infantry captain.  He had not mentioned it in his opening remarks, but someone asked him how he earned his Bronze star and he said, "Oh, you know: Combat."

 Most of the citizens who attended that session were women in their sixties. They thought he sounded too angry and too aggressive. He was beaten by Chris Pappas, a restaurant owner from Manchester.

 When I asked  Papas how he intended to deal with Jim Jordan and the other macho men the Republicans were sending to Congress, he said, "Well, I'm not going down there to get into a food fight."

I got into trouble with Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party for calling Papas a house cat. I thought he was going down to Washington to a knife fight, and he was bringing a butter knife. Buckley controlled electronic voter lists and had a lot of other strings to pull, and Papas got the seat. Apparently, if you want to win in New Hampshire it's best not to look too confrontational. 

Which is not to say New Hampshire politicians are cut from a cloth of "New Hampshire Nice." 

We are not Minnesota.

Dudley Dudley is, to my mind, the prototypic New Hampshire politician of choice.

Dudley Dudley

In 1973, she discovered that Aristotle Onassis had decided to use his fleet of ships to bring oil to the New Hampshire seacoast, where he planned to off load the black sludge into a depot at the Isles of Shoals, and pump it 15 miles in an underwater pipeline to the coast where another pipeline would run another 20 miles up the coast to Great Bay, where he would build the world's largest oil refinery.  The estimated expected annual oil leakage into the ocean was 8000 gallons, which would have killed the lobsters. And the seals would have been none too happy. 

Joined by two women, a newspaper owner and a local housewife with organizational skills,  Dudley managed to introduce legislation which blew Onassis out of the water, at least temporarily.  This incensed the owner of the Manchester Union Leader, William F. Loeb, who railed that these three small breasted women had no business raising objections to a business deal, and, for that matter women had no business being in the legislature--he always called Dudley "MRS Thomas Dudley"-- and he thought it offensive that a woman would  own a newspaper, and they were jeopardizing a huge win for New Hampshire which would make automobile gasoline cheap in the state and which would provide 10,000 new jobs. 

Of course, neither of those claims had any basis, even remotely, in the truth, but those were different times and the truth mattered then. 

In 2022, not quite the 50th anniversary of the triumph of right over might, Dudley was honored with a town meeting at the U-U Church, where she warned of a new threat from an planned cargo plane airport at Pease airport, which would fill the skies with continuous airplane roaring day and night.  She had opposed the building of the nuclear plant at Seabrook in 1977, four years after she beat Onassis, but she lost that one.  She was beaten by the governor and his attorney general, David Suter--yes, that David Suter--who rushed down to the seacoast when he heard that local judges were releasing arrested protesters on their own recognizance, and he insisted they be jailed. These protesters were disrupting commerce occupying the construction site, and they were mostly hippies mostly interested in having sex in their tents and sleeping bags and they were getting in the way of a safe source of power. Two years later, in 1979 the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island blew up and nearly melted down.

"We lost that fight," Dudley told me, "But we found Renny Cushing." Cushing, a twenty something, eventually became a Representative in the New Hampshire legislature, and after years of campaigning, he managed to get New Hampshire to eliminate the death penalty. His own father had been murdered on the doorstep of their home and Renny had a lot of credibility when it came to the death penalty.

Hampton continues to be a purple town: Trump lost by just 60 votes out of 3,000 cast in Hampton in 2024. 

The town continues to vote an allocation, a slush fund really, to the town's Catholic Church school despite the obvious violation of the first amendment.  Every year speeches are given at the town's "Deliberative Session" where arguments about the obvious violation of church and state are made, and people listen politely, if indifferently.

Someone usually quotes John F. Kennedy: "I am for the absolute separation of church and state. I believe no public funds ought ever be granted to any church or to any church school."  This is said to appeal to the Catholic congregation which constitutes the bulk of those who vote for the fund. It has never worked.

And then someone gets up to say what a wonderful school Sacred Heart is, and the warrant article gets voted through. 

The Constitution, the first amendment, none of this matters. We know the families who send their kids to Sacred Heart, and we like them. 

One man said that just because someone says giving taxpayer funds to a church school violates the first amendment, doesn't mean it really is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, he said, knows a lot more about the Constitution than we do, and we ought to defer to them. If the justices say separation of church and state and the First Amendment are unconstitutional, then they probably are.  And, anyway, there are lots of examples of the government funding religious institutions and churches, although he did not cite a single instance. It was enough to just say it.

 When an amendment was offered saying that a similar fund ought to be available to any school that wants it, any school religious or not,  another man rose to say, "But then we might have a Church of Satan come to town and demand funds for its school."  So the amendment got voted down. 

We vote taxpayer funds only for churches we like.

New Hampshire once had the first primary in the nation, until Joe Biden came to New Hampshire in 2020. 

Mary McCarthy dragged me off to see him speak at a restaurant to about 150 people. When the time came for questions, someone asked about the Middle East and he replied that we  ought to be taking a moon shot to beat cancer, which is the disease which took his son.  I looked at Mary, whose jaw had dropped.  Other questions followed, and sometimes Biden seemed to be headed in the general direction of an answer to a question posed, only to lose track of the question and wander off into some answer to some question nobody had asked.  He invariably lost his way, and go lost in the undergrowth of his own neurons.

"Oh," Mary said. "This is not the same man."

You did not need four years in medical school to know Joe Biden had entered into some phase of dementia. 

As it turned out, dementia was not necessarily such a bad thing in a President. His four years were remarkably successful. Like Reagan before him, whose dementia was better concealed, being President turns out to be a job which does not require full faculties.  Wouldn't want that in a brain surgeon or an airplane pilot or an HVAC guy, but for President, maybe not so bad.

New Hampshire voted for four other Democrats ahead of Joe Biden, but he went on to win in South Carolina, and he was off to the races, because New Hampshire should never have been determinant in national politics in the first place. Too white. Too rural. Too 1950's. 

Maybe also too close to the candidates. There's something to say for seeing politicians close up.

But when Joe Biden came in 5th in New Hampshire, he made sure that state would never be the "first in the nation" primary again.  That lost the state millions of dollars: all those news organization, campaign organizations buying air time on TV, filling hotel rooms, restaurants.  Biden was right, of course. New Hampshire has no business choosing national candidates. We are too much of an anomaly.  We are Iowa wearing plaid shirts and suspenders with our belts. In the general election New Hampshire forgave Biden and voted for him by about a thousand votes. 

The state is something of a time capsule, but its citizens are engaged. They go to meetings and they listen and they judge. 

When Thornton Wilder set "Our Town" in New Hampshire, he knew what he was doing. There is a certain timelessness about small town life and apart from Manchester, that's what most of New Hampshire is, small towns. I can walk from my front door to the hardware store, the dry cleaners, the grocery store, two coffee shops, the library, town hall, five churches, two pizza places, four barber shops, seven restaurants, the post office, two drug stores, two car washes, four gas stations, a garage mechanic,  and the beach is 3.4 miles.  

There is a seawall running more than a mile along the shoreline, and high school girls sit in their folding aluminum chairs and their bikinis on top of that, while boys buzz around.  Traffic and population quadruples in the summer, and seals flop up on rocks a hundred yards offshore. Lobster trap buoys bob a little farther out. 

When the summer ebbs and autumn drifts in, there is sometimes a warm interlude, which  was best described by one of New Hampshire's best known authors, and for my money, nobody has ever written a more evocative or better description:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. in norther New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an uncharted season which  lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of the winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for  a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

--Grace Metalious  Peyton Place, 1956

Senators Shaheen and Hassan Go Full DINO

 

You may not have been watching, but Mad Dog's son, in California was watching, and he phoned to ask: What's with your New Hampshire Senators? They both voted to confirm eight of Trump's cabinet appointees, and nine if you count Marco Rubio.

Actually, my son turns out to be right.

Our Senators, who New Hampshire voters thought were Democrats voted to seat:

1/ Kristi Noem: Homeland Security, who as Governor of South Dakota sent her National Guard to the Mexican border, wants a national abortion ban, shot her own dog and a goat, thus cementing her cred as a strong advocate for gun rights and the Second Amendment, and demonstrating she is willing to pull the trigger, which is essential to homeland security, and in Congress she sponsored a bill to forbid the EPA  from clean air efforts, and voted to cancel Obamacare. 

2/ Chris Wright: Energy, a climate change denier who nevertheless thinks global warming would be a good thing because it would save millions of lives which would otherwise be lost from freezing to death. He said that climate change protest movement is collapsing under its own weight.

The last Trump appointee who was supposed to kill the Department of Energy was Rick Perry, who had vowed to kill the DOE (once he finally recalled its name) only to arrive and discover it's the DOE that maintains the missile silos, cleans up nuclear waste in contaminated soil like Hanford, Washington, and chases down the occasional nuclear bomb when it inadvertently falls out of an Air Force plane. He also discovered it was DOE research that created fracking. Perry was a big enough man to reverse himself, and say if he had known all the great stuff DOE did, he'd have advocated for strengthening it, not destroying it. Wright has not yet shown any signs of a moment of Paul on the road to Damascus, so to speak. 

2/John Lee Ratcliffe: CIA director whose claim to fame is he berated FBI Director Comey for not investigating and charging Hillary Clinton over her emails.

3/ Sean Duffy: Dept Transportation, who said that China, Europe, Canada and China had committed "economic terrorism, in a way," by reacting to Trump tariffs with retaliatory tariffs.

4/ Scott Bessent: Treasury.  He immediately handed over all of Treasury's encrypted data with all those individual bank account numbers and tax information to Elon Musk.

5/ Doug Collins: Who served two years in the Navy as a chaplain, as his military service (making him a bone fide vet)  and who wrote of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, upon her death, "RIP to the more than 30 million innocent babies that have been murdered during the decades that Ruth Bader Ginsburg defend pro-abortion laws." He opposed Obamacare and supports capital punishment, denounces climate change as a hoax, and thinks tax cuts for billionaires stimulates the economy and, well, you get the picture.

6/ Brooke Rollins: Agriculture-- who suggested the solution to rising egg prices would be for Americans to keep chickens of their own in their backyards.

7/ Douglas Burgum: Not to be outdone by Kristi Noem in South Dakota, Governor Burgum sent North Dakota National Guard troops to guard the Southern border, although it would likely have been a lot cheaper to send them to guard the northern border with Canada, which currently looks like a more likely site of international conflict, don't chaknow? Youbetcha. 

So this is the rogue's gallery our DEMOCRATIC U.S. Senators have voted FOR.

Elizabeth Warren voted against every one of them. 

So, if the explanation from our Senators is that there is nothing disqualifying about any of these folks, then you would have to ask what Senator Warren found disqualifying, and you would have to ask what would be disqualifying? 

The Constitution says simply these appointments are to be made with the advice and consent of the Senate.  So that sort of leaves it up to the individual Senator's conscience, and I would say, Naw, I'm voting against each of these mopes, because they are just too MAGA weird, and leave it at that. 

O'Rourke

Mad Dog suggests we start making plans now to find candidates to run in primaries against Senator Shaheen in 2026,  and another for Senator Hassan's seat in 2029.

We can do better. 

We've got good Democrats who have sought office in New Hampshire, but who were shunted out of the way by Ray Buckley and the establishment, who controlled the purse strings and the voter lists, people like Terence O'Rourke, of Rochester, New Hampshire, who came to notice  when he was running for the open U.S. Congressional seat, after the Charlottesville, VA killings, at a white nationalist rally. 

O'Rourke was speaking at a meeting of Rockingham County Democrats, one of nearly a dozen candidates, and when he got up to the podium, most people were too busy gossiping and chatting, but he caught everyone's attention, and caught many off guard, when he stated simply, "I know there are so many things which divide us starkly right now, but I would have thought the one thing we could all agree in, in America, even now, is that there is no such thing as a very fine  Nazi."

This was after President Trump had said there were very fine people on both sides of that bloody rally in Charlottesville.

O'Rourke

It stopped everyone dead in their tracks that night.

Ultimately, my Democratic friends and compatriots in Hampton did not vote for Mr. O'Rourke, because they thought he was too strident, too angry for New Hampshire. These were mostly women talking. And it's true, O'Rourke is an attorney, and not adverse to conflict, and he had been an Army officer and had fought in the Middle East, and although he never mentioned it, a little Googling revealed he had won a Bronze Star. 

So, yes, maybe he was just a little too manly for our New Hampshire Democrats. 

But what do you think those same folks would say now?

Of Transgender Mice and Men

 

Oh! Those transgender mice.

President Trump lambasted our woke National Institutes of Health and the rest of the woke government for spending $8 million on "TRANSGENDER MICE!"

Can you imagine!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FspfF1N0LJQ

And behind him on the stage, were J.D. Vance (over his right shoulder) and Speaker Johnson (left shoulder), tut-tutting and smirking and shaking their heads in wonder at just how clueless and radical those Democratic medical researchers must be.  Let's get DOGE all over that transgender mice program!

Democrats are not content with grabbing your little Jimmy when he goes to school a happy beautiful little boy and doing a sex change operation on him so he comes home a girl--now they are after the mice! And they are spending millions on these mice.

And the transgender mouse program has exploded because those illegal Haitian immigrants have eaten all the cats!

Oh, wait!  

Actually, those were "transGENIC" mice not "transgender" mice. And memo to the President: those are two very different things, not at all the same, mice of a different stripe, you might say.

Transgenic mice, which are mice bred in the laboratory with specific genes are useful in cancer research--in a lot of different types of research--especially if you want to know whether a particular tumor which harbors a particular type of genetic mutation driving its growth might be susceptible to a particular drug. These are not mice with gender dysphoria, who have complained about feeling like a Minnie Mouse when, in fact, they were born as Mickey Mice.

So, $8 million spent on cancer research for a group of diseases which cost America billions and untold suffering may not be such a bad idea.

What Me Worry?

Does the White House not have any employees who check out these stories before they get stuffed into President Trump's speeches? Wait, no. They've fired the "fact checkers" in the government. Who  needs to check facts in Trump World?

The fact is, someone very well may have seen that line in the President's speech and tried to warn him not to say that, but the President does not care about details...like whether something is actually true. What he cares about is whether it can get a laugh. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I don't care whether there is a transgender mouse; I care whether we can talk about transgender mice. 

And, of speaking of bad ideas, when RFK JR shrugs off the deadly measles outbreak which started in Texas and has spread as far east as Florida, and when he says, "Oh, well, we get those measles outbreaks, you know, now and then."

Under Secretary for Vaccines, Dept HHS

Well, actually not. 

There have been measles outbreaks in cult communities, like the outbreak among unvaccinated Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn in 2018, but the only outbreaks we have seen in the US have been among the unvaccinated cults. Vaccines virtually eliminated measles outbreaks in this country, well, Until Now. 

So Bobby Brainworm has struck again. 

Yo! Where's Your Suit?

 

Stephen Colbert suggested that Volodymyr Zelensky might have replied to Brian Glenn's taunt, "Don't you own a suit?"  by saying "Oh, like your suit? Where did you buy it? Do they have a Men's Department in that store?"

Actually, Mr. Zelensky's riposte was not at all bad: "Maybe, when the war is over I will buy a suit like yours. Maybe a better suit."

Ralph Lauren:  Eat Your Heart Out!

This has become something of an on line sport: What would you have tossed back at Mr. Glenn?

Adrienne! Where's My Suit?

To People appearing in court in orange jump suits: Where is your suit?

To Supreme Court Justices in black robes: Where's your suit?

To Rocky Balboa, outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, dancing around in his sweat pants: Where's your suit?

Puffy Pink Guy: Wimp Pride

You could not come to dinner at Downton Abbey in a tuxedo with a black tie--so de`classe`! You need white tie for dinner.

The Phantom has decried, on his blog, "The Phantom Speaks," the dressing down of American society, where people line up to board an airplane in what looks like pajamas for a sleep over party, but the idea of a war time leader having to "show respect" by dressing up in a suit was simply so frat boy it was hard to process.

Wimps Gang Up On a Real Tough Guy

President Zelensky has been living with the threat of imminent death for 3 years now,  and Mr. Glenn is currently whining about getting death threats because of his remark.

Ukrainian Formal Wear

 Well, welcome to Mr. Zelensky's world, Mr. Glenn.

Is Shame Stupid?

 

The MAGA respondent on this blog, Anonymous, has raised one point which has gnawed at me for some time now: Is my urgency to send arms and money to Ukraine every bit as foolish and ill considered as the impulse which drove America to intervene and send troops to Vietnam?

It's the old question of intervention, of the "foreign entanglements" which George Washington warned against. Of course, Washington was a slave holder who wanted nothing more than to retreat to Mount Vernon, where he had dominion over his world, and he wanted to be left alone so he could abuse his slaves in peace.

Reading, re-reading, "The Best And The Brightest," about how the bright boys, products of elite institutions, guided Lyndon Johnson toward war in Vietnam; it is clear that these self assured, arrogant, conceited men played on Johnson's insecurities that he was just an under-educated hick from Texas, vulgar, but most of all, they played on his insecurities about manhood and machismo. Was he brave enough to make the tough choices? Was he man enough to send American boys to die in the rice paddies?

Johnson did it because he was afraid. He was afraid of being accused of being afraid to take bold action, afraid of being accused of being afraid to do the manly thing.

As George Carlin said: "Pull out? You want me to pull out? That doesn't sound very manly to me!"

And what was the bold thing to do? To stop Communism in its tracks, to keep godless Commies from knocking down one domino after another, until all of Asia and South America were communist, and we'd have Commies knocking on our door? 

That bright and shining lie.

We know now that half baked ideas, that appeals to emotionalism can be filled with explosive land mines.

On the other hand, when something, even from a distance, is manifestly, undeniably evil, do we not ask ourselves how we could have sat on our hands because we had no skin in the game? Watching a playground bully beat up a defenseless kid because it's not me getting pounded--what does that make me feel like?

The last scene of the Godfather II movie shows the sons of the Godfather in their dining room, awaiting the Godfather's arrival and Michael announces he has enlisted in the Marines to go fight World War II. Sonny, his older brother, erupts in rage, storms across the table to pummel his younger brother: "You would fight for...STRANGERS?" he shouts. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=435mkg6_eGQ

For Sonny, all those who enlisted to fight are "saps" fighting for people not in their family. In that is Trump's echo of John McCain and all those who went off to fight in uniform were "suckers."

And that is the essence of the problem: For Michael, being an American means something, not to mention being his own man. For Sonny, there is no obligation to anyone but members of his own family, his own blood, as he puts it.

Sonny, like Trump lives in a feudal world where the strong take what they want, when they want it--a man can grab a woman by the pussy, to use Mr. Trump's language, if he is big enough and strong enough. He doesn't have to worry about a delicate concept like rape, if he's big enough. The powerful take what they want. The lions take what they want. The rest of the animals on the Serengeti plain are just prey.

But for many Americans the idea of being a superhero, of standing up for what is right, and coming to the rescue does not seem a fool's game. The calvary riding in are not "suckers."

The last scene ("Take Off") of the "Band of Brothers" first episode, shows Richard Winters, reaching out his hand and hauling each of his platoon members up to his feet, and watching them load into the airplane which will take them over Europe to fight on D-Day. It is simple and breath-taking. 

As Paul Krugman has said, that was what America once was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOZUB0EHadw&t=177s

Another episode is called, "Why We Fight" about Easy Company stumbling into a concentration camp and liberating it. This has been set up by a scene of a veteran soldier, Frank Perconte, cynically berating a fresh replacement who is all eager to find some Germans to fight. For Perconte, who has fought from D-Day across Europe and into Germany, the best thing that can happen to him, what he's fighting for, is to sleep on a real bed with real sheets, under a roof, and to have real toilet paper. That is the height of glory for him. 

But it is Perconte who is staggered to  see what his patrol has uncovered--the concentration camp, with its skeletal survivors. 

So the episode was misnamed: none of the American soldiers had any idea how evil the forces they defeated were, until they defeated them. They had clues, but there was much cynicism, as one of the soldiers reads a passage from "Stars and Stripes" saying, "It seems the Germans are...BAD." And everyone laughs. Well, they weren't laughing after they found that concentration camp.

They may have been fighting for many reasons--to protect their comrades in arms, to sleep under a roof, but until they found the concentration camp, they could not have known what other good their fight could achieve. 

Many of my friends have struggled to express how it made them feel to watch Trump snigger at  Zelensky in the Oval Office.  On PBS Newshour, February 28, 2025, a day which will live in infamy,  we watched Trump carry out his own Pearl Harbor attack,  berating the valiant President Zelensky, "You don't have any cards, without us!"  

We all felt it. We all were a little surprised to feel an emotion we had rejected as quaint: Whatever else that scene made us feel--anger, disgust, nausea--and we may have felt all those things--but overwhelmingly, what we felt was shame.

David Brooks said the same thing, on the Newshour: He stumbled through a gamut of emotions, but he wound up on "shame."

Ashamed to be an American. Ashamed that we were now with the bad guys. Ashamed to be on the Sonny Corleone side of the street, looking at those who enlisted, mostly driven by blind faith that America will take the good side of any fight, and Sonny calling all those men who signed up to fight, "Saps."

Not since Vietnam, when it finally became apparent we weren't saving the world, but immolating it, had I felt ashamed to be an American. 

Lee Greenwood can sing all he wants, but it will take a long time to wash that shame away.