Vol. CCLVI, No. 21 July 13, 2012
The New Hampshire Gazette
Live
Free! or Die
The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ • Editor: Steven Fowle • Founded 1756 by Daniel Fowle
First Class U.S. Postage Paid Portsmouth, N.H., Permit No. 75
PO Box 756, Portsmouth, NH 03802 • editors@nhgazette.com • www.nhgazette.com
Address Service Requested
The Fortnightly Rant
Fast and Furious — and Fabricated Late last month, for first time in history, Congress cited a sitting Cabinet officer for both civil and criminal contempt. Attorney General Eric Holder incurred the wrath of Congress by refusing to turn over documents relating to the the so-called “Fast and Furious” case. Technically, the citations may be historic, but practically speaking they were meaningless. All the civil citation does is clear the way for Congress to file a lawsuit someday which may possibly result, years hence, in an obscure judge perhaps deciding that Holder was wrong and should have coughed up the documents. Equally feckless, the criminal citation refers the squabble to Ronald Machen, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and asks him — an Obama appointee — to think about maybe filing some charges against Holder — who is his boss. Congress knows that these votes are legally toothless. But “Fast and Furious” isn’t about the law. It’s about politics. Important If True On February 23, 2011, Sharyl Atkisson reported on the CBS Evening News that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms [ATF] was intentionally allowing straw purchasers associated with Mexican drug cartels to take thousands of assault rifles and other weapons across the border. Two of those guns, she said, had been found near the body of murdered U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Nine days later CBS aired an emotionally-charged interview with ATF agent John Dodson, a participant in “Operation Fast and Furious,” who corroborated Atkisson’s original story. Counter-Intuitive The story quickly triggered
some counter-intuitive behavior on the Right. Republicans heroically overcame their chronic skepticism towards the biased liberal news media and swallowed CBS’s story whole. And their friends in the National Rifle Association [NRA] flip-flopped. Instead of hating the ATF’s jackbooted thugs for confiscating people’s guns, they despised them for not doing so. In no time flat, “Fast and Furious” became the new Watergate. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the Right Wing chorus began screaming bloody murder. Some Champion The groundwork for the contempt vote was done by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa [R-CA]. And Issa is the perfect man for the job — from a Republican point of view, anyway. He could hardly wait to investigate the Obama Administration. After the 2010 election, already anticipating his appointment as Committee Chairman, Issa told Politico that he intended to make Obama’s the most investigated administration ever. “I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks,” he said. He wasted no time arriving at a conclusion. Before the election Issa said, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, that President Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” Issa should know corruption. A New Yorker profile suggests he’s got a certain familiarity with it. Written by Ryan Lizza and published January 24, 2011, the article tells of how Issa acquired a car alarm company in 1982 by foreclosing on a business loan. He later opened a box on his desk, revealing a gun inside, and
told an employee he was fired. Later that year a fire destroyed the company’s building — shortly after he quadrupled his fire insurance coverage and, according to his former business partner, removed the company’s computer, financial records, and all other vital documents. The insurance company concluded it was arson, but the state fire marshal did not make a determination. No one was ever charged. Issa was in the Army in 1971 when a fellow soldier’s car disappeared. It reappeared the day after its owner threatened to kill Issa. A year later he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. In 1979 Issa was indicted for grand theft in an apparent insurance scam involving an allegedly stolen car. That case was dropped after Issa repurchased the car. In 1981 he left the scene of an accident but avoided charges by making an undisclosed payment to the injured driver of the other vehicle.
Likely Stories Lizza dutifully notes that Issa was able to provide exculpatory but unverifiable explanations for each of these dubious incidents. If the tables were turned and Holder offered Issa excuses of a similar quality for the “Fast and Furious” fiasco, they would not have won him any mercy. A Hopeless Situation An article published last month in Fortune magazine — hardly a vehicle of leftist propaganda — finally makes “Fast and Furious” somewhat comprehensible. “T]he ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels,” read Fortune’s teaser. “How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.” Writer Katherine Eban, who spent six months researching the piece, learned that ATF agents did try to arrest straw purchasers — but they were prevented from doing so by the U.S. Attorney. They said such arrests could not be made under Arizona’s lax gun
laws — which Republicans and the NRA support and ferociously defend. The straw purchases were legal. But, as Mark Twain used to say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And, as a Florida appeals court explicitly ruled in 2003, the First Amendment gives news organizations — CBS and Fox News alike — the right to lie if they want to. Meet the New BoogeyMan If Joe Stalin ever wrote a show trial instruction manual, it would probably begin, “First, arrive at the verdict.” Twelve years ago the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre accused President Clinton of “tolerat[ing] a certain amount of violence and killing to strengthen the case for gun control and to score points for his party.” This April Issa addressed the NRA and echoed LaPierre’s conspiracy theory. “’Fast and Furious,’” he said, “can be seen as nothing else but” such an attack on the right to keep and bear arms.
fused to fight. Gaffney was too busy getting a BS in Foreign Service at Georgetown and an MA in International Studies at Johns Hopkins. In the eyes of the average grunt of that era, such credentials made a man an “educated fool.” Yet they worked for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson [D-WA]. Jackson, often called “The Senator from Boeing” for his ability to win defense contracts for the company, hired Gaffney to work with Richard Perle, another belligerent Vietnam-era non-combatant, in his Senate office — birthplace of the “neo-conservative” movement. After Ronald Reagan’s election, Perle and Gaffney, along with fellow neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz and
Douglas Feith, serially infested a number of high-level State and Defense Department offices. Switching back to CSP’s official line, its website claims that “[i]n April 1987, Mr. Gaffney was nominated by President Reagan to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, the senior position in the Defense Department with responsibility for policies involving nuclear forces, arms control and U.S.-European defense relations. He acted in that capacity for seven months during which time, he was the Chairman of the prestigious High Level Group,
News Briefs
National Security Authority Briefs Portsmouth Republicans The Award-Winning Local Daily informed its readers on Wednesday that Frank Gaffney would be speaking to the local Rotary Club on Thursday and to the Seacoast Republican Women this morning in Rye. Here’s how their lede paragraph began: “The former assistant secretary of defense for International Security Policy under President Ronald Reagan ….” That sounds pretty impressive. The AWLD goes on to further identify Gaffney as “the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. [CSP].” The paper describes CSP as a “non-partisan educational corporation … nationally and interna-
tionally recognized as a resource for timely, informed analyses of foreign and defense policy matters.” So, it appears at first glance that a former high government official operating a worthy and authoritative institution focused on our national security has come to our humble town to share his wisdom generously with concerned local citizens. Big-Time Propagandist Visits Paradoxically, this little story could also sound like a notorious Right Wing extremist had his D.C. propaganda shop crank out a boilerplate press release and ship it off to Rupert Murdoch’s local profit center, which then passed it on, after a superficial re-
write, to its long-suffering readers. We can’t prove our little theory, though, because CSP does not waste precious electrons emailing such tripe to this newspaper. Here’s a bio of Gaffney from a perspective he does not control: he was born in Washington, D.C. on April 5, 1953, so he turned 18 in April of 1971 — old enough to enlist in the U.S. military in its hour of alleged need. On the National Mall in Gaffney’s home town stand three ten-foot tall, black granite panels — parts of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. They bear the names of some 2,100 men, killed in Vietnam between April, 1971 and the end of hostilities, in a war that Gaffney “supported” but re-
News Briefs to page two