Vol. CCLVI, No. 20 June 29, 2012
The New Hampshire Gazette
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The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ • Editor: Steven Fowle • Founded 1756 by Daniel Fowle
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The Fortnightly Rant
Welcome Home
The best thing to be said of the Iraq War is that it is over, and even that is not quite true. Ask a survivor forty years from now. Nine days from now, the City of Portsmouth will host a Welcome Home Parade for Iraq War Veterans. This a pretty big deal. We will be just the second city in the U.S. to do so, and the first in New England. The last American troops left Iraq six months ago, so it’s none too soon. The Pentagon thinks otherwise, though. It would prefer that the nation postpone any parades until Afghanistan has settled down. Officially that should happen relatively soon; the smart money bets otherwise. Curiously, in this instance at least, Conservatives seem not to mind that their precious generals are being overruled. Because other franchises in the Global War on Terror [GWOT] are still open for business, the July 8th parade will be a concrete marker of a somewhat arbitrary distinction. Some of the active duty troops marching that day will no doubt be told, sooner or later, to report to Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan are two different places with different cultures, but for an American soldier those distinctions probably don’t matter much. Both places are utterly foreign and essentially hostile. Always half-assed, now the GWOT is half-over. Decisions, Decisions Six out of ten Americans supported the Iraq War when it started. Now six out of ten Americans think it was a bad idea. And some days — certain Tuesdays in November, in particular — it seems like they are the same six.
Thanks to an earlier military adventure that didn’t go well, we’ve learned to distinguish our warriors from the wars we send them to fight. Better to have that skill than not. If we could just learn not to start bad wars, though, we could safely let that skill grow rusty. Dubious Battle The Iraq War was conjured up out of falsehoods by men who dodged the war of their own youth then camouflaged their cowardice with protestations of patriotism. It was fought by so-called volunteers who were goaded by an economic draft and lured by public approbation, itself a reaction to residual remorse left over from the poor treatment received by a previous generation of conscripts. From its inception through its execution the war was a pretty shabby affair, pitting tin doors against buried bombs and skimping on body armor, for example. But that’s no reason to skimp on a celebration of its ending. All We Can Do = Little Enough Quite the opposite, in fact. Amends should be made. We are holding this parade to ceremoniously honor our men and women who fought in Iraq. Ceremonies are literally the least thing that we can do — this parade will cost the city less than the ordnance a single platoon in Kandahar might use on a bad day — and the least thing we should do. The parade’s organizers have thoughtfully arranged to follow the pomp and circumstance with more practical exercises such as a jobs and services fair. It’s a start — a small, local, isolated start. One might have thought, judging from the praise lavished on
the members of our military before we sent them off to Hell, that when they returned needing help from the Veterans Administration [VA] they would find it waiting for them. But one would be wrong yet again. The VA did increase its mental health staffing by 46 percent between 2005 and 2010, but apparently that wasn’t enough. It claimed until recently that 95 percent of the time it was meeting its goal of evaluating new clients within 14 days. A recent Inspector General’s report revealed that the average wait is more like 60 days. The backlog of cases now stands at 860,000. At least the VA can claim it’s overwhelmed — the Pentagon has no excuse. It has discharged thousands of service members for having previously-undetected “personality disorders” — which do not qualify for disability com-
pensation — when in fact many or most of them no doubt suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which does. That is a disgraceful flim-flam clearly intended to hide the real cost of war. That the same voices which once called for war can now be heard protesting that taxes must not raised for any reason further compounds the disgrace. Veterans For Peace? Those planning to march include several chapters of Veterans for Peace and Portsmouth’s own Leftist Marching Band. The decision for these vets to participate did not come easily. Though expressly invited by the organizers, their first instinct was to decline. In the context of a parade that would surely be full of military trappings, their presence might be seen as an endorsement by some. Ultimately they decided not to let the risk of misunderstanding
stand between themselves and their fellow veterans. One Last Really Tough Battle It’s too late now to make this war right — it was far too wrong from the beginning. But you cannot honor a sacrifice by telling fairy tales. We owe it to those who were in it to tell the truth. That’s likely to be a perpetual battle. The public has known for decades that the Vietnam War was an irredeemable catastrophe. But the Pentagon is now burning tax dollars to officially “observe” the war’s 50th Anniversary — and rewrite it. A timeline on its official website, VietnamWar50th.com, makes no mention of the 1956 elections that we would not allow. It cites Operation Farm Gate — the start of the air war — but not its violation of the Geneva Convention. When the time comes, the site will ignore the role GIs played in stopping the war, too.
State Director of Americans for Prosperity [AFP], an IRS-registered 501(c)(4) organization.* AFP was created and is supported by David Koch, who, along with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a privately held company with annual revenues estimated at $100 billion. The brothers obtained the company the traditional way: they inherited it from Daddy. As was said of George Herbert [Hoover]
Walker Bush, the brothers were born on third base and thought they’d hit a triple. In his capacity as the Koch Brothers’ local puppet, Lewandowski filed a Right to Know request Monday morning demanding to know the identity of the anonymous donor. “The donor may have business pending before the town or may be trying to skirt (Federal Election Campaign) law, which precludes this sort of donation. We are deeply troubled over the anonymity of this donation and hope Town Administrator Selig will respond to our request in a timely manner.” Is this a great country or what? Where but in America could the hired stooge of hereditary plutocrats be found shedding such copious tears over the amount of
money his bosses take in every 6.3 seconds? Lewandowski, it must be said, is a real pro at faking concern over the democratic (small ‘d’ of course) process. He was similarly exercised in August of 2009 when Mr. Obama spoke at Portsmouth High School. The best part of this show is its robust, full-throated hypocrisy. The whole point of AFP’s being registered as a 501(c)(4) rather than a (c)(3) is so that donors can remain anonymous. Hey! Let’s Try This! This being New Hampshire, the home of cautious, conservative self-government, there’s a brilliant new program in the works: we’re going to turn the state prison over
News Briefs
Dear Mr. President: Beat It President Barack Obama visited Durham on Monday during a campaign swing through the Northeast, sparking excitement at both ends of the political spectrum. Local Democrats were naturally happy to see their champion in the flesh once again, and Republicans were pleased to have another excuse to make a big fuss. Todd Selig, Durham’s Town Administrator, sent out a press release on Saturday calling for an “Emergency Counil [sic] Meeting” first thing Monday morning to discuss “as a Council in public in full [sic] and whether the Council desires to take the symbolic action of disinviting the President from visiting Durham.” “Our sincere hope,” Selig’s release went on to say, “is that this meeting will not be necessary and
that the campaign will agree to reimburse the town’s projected public safety costs associated with the event.” Translated from Republicanese into English, that sentence would read, “Oh, Lord, please let this insignificant kerfuffle go all the way to the Supreme Court.” According to our sources Selig does not have the power to call an “emergency” meeting on his own hook, but not to worry: Jay Gooze, Chairman of the Town Council, being a good Democrat, immediately knuckled under and called the meeting for Selig. At about this point an anonymous benefactor — John Beresford Tipton, Jr., perhaps — pledged up to $20,000 to cover the town’s costs. End of story, right? Not hardly. Cue Corey Lewandowski, the
* According to the U.S. Tax Code these are supposed to be “civic leagues and other corporations … operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare, or local associations of employees with membership limited to a designated company or people in a particular municipality or neighborhood, and with net earnings devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes.” [Definition courtesy of SourceWatch.org.] AFP qualifies, so long as you consider “grinding the middle class into the dirt” and “social welfare” to be synonymous.
News Briefs to page two