Ron Paul, the maverick Texas congressman who has twice run for the Republican presidential nomination, won’t endorse the nominee of his party. Though Paul said last week it was “very unlikely” he would endorse former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, he made it definitive in an interview October 12 on the CNBC program Futures Now.

“No,” he said, plainly and unequivocally, when asked about an endorsement. Neither the GOP challenger nor President Obama will change the course of fiscal and monetary policy that is leading to what has been called the “fiscal cliff,” Paul said, because both are captive of special interests. And neither will act to stop the Federal Reserve from papering over the growing chasm of debt by inflating the money supply in a policy called “quantitative easing.”

“Both [are] within the establishment where they need the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort to make sure that you can take all the risk in the world,” Paul said, describing the “Fed” as an essential prop of what is essentially a “one-party system” in which both Republicans and Democrats refuse to cut federal spending.

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” said the 12-term congressman, “and believe me, there is essentially no difference from one administration to another, no matter what the platforms [say]. The foreign policy stays the same, the monetary policy stays the same, there’s no proposal for any real cuts and both parties support it.”

Economic analysts are warning the already weak economy will be knocked back into recession by the December 31 expiration of personal and business tax cuts, an increase in the alternative minimum tax and the beginning of taxes related to the “ObamaCare” health care law – all combined with “across the board” spending cuts required by the sequester provision of the agreement to raise the debt ceiling made in Congress on August 1, 2011. In agreeing to an increase in the government’s borrowing authority, the lawmakers stipulated that automatic spending cuts would occur unless Congress acted to reduce annual spending increases and lower the nation’s debt, now pegged at more than $16 trillion. According to the financial journal Barron’s, more than 1,000 government programs, including military spending and Medicare, will face steep cuts. Though some analysts claim the effect will be gradual, calling it more of a “fiscal slope” than a “cliff,” nearly all agree the direction for the economy will be downward.

“They’re not going to allow all those terrible things to happen on January 1, but they’re not going to solve the problem either,” Paul said. But as the Federal Reserve begins a third round of quantitative easing, called “QE3,” the Texas congressman warned the cheap money policy will wreak havoc on the nation’s economy.

“Eternities with QEs are going to happen,” said Paul, warning that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “will destroy the dollar if we don’t come to our senses, and really cut spending and live within our means.”

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Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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When former Speaker of the House and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spoke of the Palestinians as an "invented people," many were offended on behalf of the Palestinians. But former Massachusetts Governor and GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney was offended on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Before I made a statement of that nature," Romney admonished Gingrich in a debate, "I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’"

That was vintage Mitt Romney. Expect to hear more of it as we enter the summer season, the national conventions and the fall campaign. When he was a candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, Romney was asked if the President could launch military action against Iran without congressional authorization. The lawyers, Romney replied, will sort out those questions. (Ron Paul responded as though he had been launched from anti-ballistics missile, as he pointedly shot down the notion that lawyers, in the White House or elsewhere, could explain away the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war.) Romney has repeatedly said he wants the generals "on the ground" in Afghanistan to decide when we should bring our troops home form that desolate land that has little to offer besides endless warfare. And he apparently is prepared to submit our foreign policy and, indeed, our domestic political debate, to the imprimatur of the Prime Minister of Israel.

Consider: The U.S. Secretary of Defense, the director of our Central Intelligence Agency, and 16 different intelligence services of the United States have said at various times from 2007 to the present that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. Yet it is ostensibly because of the possibility that what Iran maintains is its civilian nuclear program might be converted to a strategic military capability that the United States has imposed what David Axelrod, senior political advisor to President Obama, has called the "most withering" economic sanctions ever imposed on any nation. And Romney and many leading Republicans claim those sanctions are not tough enough. Romney has called for truly "crippling" sanctions, backed by serious and credible threat of military force.

"You’re a tough guy?" asked Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. You’re going to stare them down and say ‘Look, I’m gonna use them’?" Romney sat passively, showing no emotion as O’Reilly warned. "If you bomb Iran that starts World War III. You know that. They’re going to try to block Hormuz. Oil will double. The unintended consequences to the United States all across the Muslim world will be horrible." Yes, Romney no doubt knows all that. But does he care?

That anyone should need to ask if the presumptive nominee of a major political party cares if he starts World War III should be startling enough. The possibility that he would be willing to do that out of a desire to help "my friend, Bibi Netanyahu" is even more shocking.

For Netanyahu has said repeatedly that he regards a nuclear-armed Iran as an "existential threat" to Israel. This despite the fact that Israel has an estimated 200 to 300 nuclear bombs of its own. If the Israelis have their own ability to deter the Iranians or retaliate in devastating fashion if Iran does attack, why do they need the economic and military power of the United States not merely to back them up, but to wage a preventive war for them?

And why have we repeatedly put American soldiers in harm’s way throughout the world when the United States was not attacked or even threatened?

Americans have grown accustomed to the role of champion of other people’s freedom and well-being. We have long been proud of the fact that the graves of American soldiers circle the globe. We have liberated countless people and we celebrate our willingness to put the lives of young Americans on the line for the oppressed of the world. But is it not now time to take a step back from the precipice of war and ask ourselves if we are really prepared to back up the check to which President Kennedy affixed our name and seal, to be paid to the order of "To Whom It May Concern"? America, the young President pledged in his Inaugural Address, would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge – and more."

"And more?" Good Lord, there’s more? Oh, yes. There is nation building around the globe. There is the duty of killing Afghanistan’s opium business, building schools, making sure their daughters receive the same education as their sons. I recall that when my state still lacked a Job Corps program, one of our local builders complained that Iraq would have a Job Corps program before New Hampshire would. As a comedian remarked way back in the Fifties, "Satire doesn’t stand a chance against reality anymore." Lyndon Johnson was determined to prove him right. Remember the promise of a Great Society on the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam?

Most people with even a minimal knowledge of history know that the last time the United States issued a formal declaration of war was in World War II, and not without cause. Try as he might to drag Americans into war to redeem the pledges made by the Machiavellians at Ten Downing Street, America did not go to war until Japan attacked an American military base on American territory in Hawaii. And we did not declare war against Germany until the Germans, bound by a treaty commitment to Japan, declared war on the United States.

When North Korean divisions invaded South Korea in June of 1950, President Harry Truman, in the absence of any previously announced defense commitment to South Korea, sent American troops into the battle without so much as a "by your leave" to the Congress of the United States. "We are not at war," he insisted at a press conference a few days later.

When a reporter asked if our involvement might be called a "police action under the United Nations," Truman, mistaking an anchor for a lifeline, grasped it and said, "Yes, that is exactly what it amounts to." Over the next three years Americans would come to bitterly resent that "police action" and the President who arbitrarily and unilaterally committed American lives to it. In all likelihood, that decision and the circumlocution describing it cost Mr. Truman another term in the White House.

Today President Obama has America committed to Afghanistan well beyond the 2014 deadline for withdrawing combat forces. There is a ten-year commitment beyond that and beyond that…? Well, who knows?

In the summer of 1972, the United States was in the middle of its eighth year of combat operations in an undeclared war in Viet Nam, a war that began under suspicious circumstances concerning a naval attack that may or may not have occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party at its national convention in Miami that summer with a speech few Americans heard, let alone heeded. Because of time-consuming procedural battles, McGovern’s speech was delivered at what one wag called "prime time in Guam. Yet its message was clear: "Come home, America!" was its oft-repeated theme. McGovern lost in a landslide to President Richard M. Nixon, who was fond of secret diplomacy in China and secret bombing in Laos and Cambodia. America did not come home.

We still have not. This Memorial Day, before we further decorate the earth with more graves of more young Americans, let us pause to consider who really "supports the troops." Is it those who are eager to send young Americans to die in other people’s quarrels or even for other nations’ imperial ambitions, all under the endlessly "entangling alliances" of the United Nations and NATO? Let patriots stand, rather, with John Quincy Adams in his July 4th toast of 1821, noting with pride that America once again, in keeping with her heritage of peace and freedom, "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

Reprinted from The New American with permission of the author.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Most shifts in history do not come with easy-to-remember dates associated with them. I could not tell you exactly when the U.S. war with Mexico began, though that war gave flesh and blood and considerable real estate to the U.S. claim that our "Manifest Destiny" was to push on through our western frontier “from sea to shining sea” and eventually become a power in the Pacific, where we would come into conflict with imperial Japan at a place called Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor was a Pacific outpost where our naval vessels and men were left in harm’s way to provide Japan with the target it was looking for, to make an attack President Roosevelt was waiting for. The attack, on the “date that will live in infamy,” would provide the United States with overwhelming justification for entering World War II against the Axis powers.

I also know we are supposed to “Remember the Maine,” the incident of alleged sabotage that sparked the Spanish-American War that left the United States in possession of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and a permanent naval base in Cuba. But I don’t remember the exact date of that incident that occurred in 1898.

Neither do I remember the date of a 2002 conversation I had with a friend who seemed determined to support the policy of George W. Bush to create a war with Iraq. Our nation was already at war in Afghanistan as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration seemed to be saying that war with Iraq was the logical next step. Many had assumed, therefore, that Iraq and that old villain from Central Casting, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with masterminding the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the aborted planned attack on the White House. There was no evidence to bear that out, but it was hard to hear the facts over the beating of the neocon war drums.

So at some point in that summer of 2002, I asked my good Republican friend why he believed we needed to go to war with Iraq. His answer startled me.

“Because I believe my government.”

Here was an educated man born in 1957. He was, I calculate, not quite in second grade when the Gulf of Tonkin incident took place, so he probably had no more clue as to what really happened in the Tonkin Gulf on that August 1964 night than members of Congress had when they promptly backed President Lyndon Johnson’s bombing raid against Hanoi with the Vietnam Resolution, authorizing the President to take whatever measures necessary to protect American military personnel in South Vietnam, where they were officially functioning as advisors to the South Vietnamese military. The floor leader in the Senate for the nearly unanimous passage of that resolution was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and later a bitter critic of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators, both Democrats, voted against the resolution that later was held up as a “functional declaration of war.” They were (drum roll, please) Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. They claimed, and history bore them out, that the administration had not provided evidence of an unprovoked attack on U.S. vessels by the North Vietnamese.

In fact, it would become clear that even President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not know what happened as they planned and authorized the retaliatory attack. A taped recording of telephone conversations between the two men made plain they were unclear about what actually took place that evening and that their main concern was that the bombing raid be launched in time for the 11 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) newscasts.

All of this occurred, as I said, when my friend who trusts his government was somewhere between first and second grade, or possibly between kindergarten and first grade. He had, however, read some history and I specifically recall his telling me that he had read Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam’s bestselling book about the Vietnam War, called The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam told the whole story in that book of the bogus attack on the U.S. ships, which were accompanying South Vietnamese vessels making raids on the North Vietnam coast when (or if) they were fired upon. So the North Vietnamese were apparently acting in self-defense, rather than seeking a war with the United States. Yet the fat was in the fire, so to speak. The United States had another “Remember the Maine” moment.

And my friend was in high school when the Watergate scandal and its even more scandalous coverup came to light. And revelations about the whitewash by an official government commission of President Kennedy’s assassination. And he might have come across the history of the U.S. spy plane shot down over Soviet territory in 1960. The reconnaissance plane, piloted by Gary Powers, was said to be a weather plane blown off course by the government, the government in which my friend believes, almost religiously. When Secretary Khrushchev was apprised of what was aboard the plane, he expressed mock surprise that CIA Director Allen Dulles had such a deep professional interest in the weather.

All of which suggests that perhaps our government is not all that believable, despite my friend’s abiding trust. And it makes me wonder what has happened to the spirit of American conservatism – that self-consciously conservative/libertarian movement I joined in the Goldwater days of my youth. For my friend is of that Republican conservative persuasion. My mind went back over the decades to the Goldwater Victory Rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in late October 1964. To be sure, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, running for President against Democrat Lyndon Johnson, was a hawk on Vietnam and had swallowed the Gulf of Tonkin story as a babe would drink his mother’s milk. But on most matters, it was clear the Goldwater crowd did not think Johnson’s government was to be trusted. We did not “believe our government.”

Goldwater himself, when we finally stopped cheering long enough to let him speak, voiced his contempt for Johnson’s banalities. So did the legendary Clare Boothe Luce, who spurned the pro-Johnson slant of husband Henry Luce’s Time-Life publications, to support Goldwater. The feisty Mrs. Luce was not one to mince words. She had once called the far Left former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President of the United States Henry Wallace “Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd,” after ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s famous puppet of that name. She had also famously said of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he “lied us into a war” into which, she believed, he ought to have honestly and courageously led us.

That Roosevelt, having done his best to provoke an attack by Germany, succeeded in maneuvering Japan into firing the necessary first shot at Pearl Harbor has been abundantly documented. James Perloff, for example, in a 2008 article for The New American, showed conclusively that the December 7 attack that we remember at this time each year was a surprise to our commanders at Pearl Harbor, but not to Roosevelt and his minions in Washington, D.C. (See also Day of Deceit by Robert B. Stinnett, 2008, and Back Door to War by Charles Callan Tansill, 1952.) The verdict has been accepted by historians, including Roosevelt apologists, many of whom contend that such deception was necessary to lead a reluctant nation into a necessary war – what some have called “the Good War.” But lie and deceive Roosevelt did, as he plotted to bring us into the war while promising to do his best to keep the nation at peace.

A lot has changed in the intervening 70 years. The United States under President George W. Bush did not attempt to maneuver the government of Saddam Hussein into initiating the attack that would start the Iraq War. Bush could start that war on his own initiative and the American people, like my friend and most members of Congress, supported him in that. Bush, in effect, became the Tojo of the 21st century by striking the first blow, though the war with Iraq was surely no surprise attack, as it had been advertised for roughly a year before the beginning of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and the shock and awe campaign that launched it. But it was either a war of aggression by the United States or that phrase no longer has any meaning.

Much ink has been spilled and paper consumed on America’s “loss of innocence” over Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, or some other cataclysmic event. America, the “exceptional nation,” lost her innocence in the Garden of Eden, like the rest of sinful humanity. But we have lost much in the way of candor in the last 70 years. For one thing the United States used to call the Department of War by its proper name. Now we call it “Defense.” Does anyone really believe that what we have been doing in Iraq is or was a defense of the United States? We now fight wars, as the late columnist Joseph Sobran observed, in the subjunctive, attacking and invading nations for what they might do with weapons they may or may not have. And if Senate Republicans and some Democrats have their way, our government will soon be locking up American citizens on the mere suspicion that they may have been aiding and abetting “terrorists,” as terrorism is defined by the government of the United States.

The United States in 1940 and 1941 repeatedly spurned overtures by Japan to reach an agreement on spheres of influence in the Pacific and to negotiate a withdrawal of Japan from most of China and other Asian lands in which she had found herself bogged down in the kind of quagmire that has since become familiar to generations of Americans. The obvious alternative to diplomacy was war. Despite the secrecy of the diplomatic maneuvers aimed at ensuring, rather than preventing, the bringing of war to the United States, government officials left a “paper trail.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson noted in his diary on November 25, 1941 the consensus of Roosevelt’s war council: “The question was how we should maneuver them into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” It would appear Washington’s covert planners of war underestimated the damage that would be done on the “date of infamy” by the naval and aerial forces of Japan, as much of our Pacific fleet was destroyed and more than 2,400 Americans lay dead amidst the flames and wreckage. And like the White House conspirators who managed to bring us into a second war with Iraq in just 12 years, Roosevelt’s war council seriously underestimated the length and cost of the “cake walk” over our foes in the East.

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox. As Patrick J. Buchanan observes, four years of the most savage and intense fighting in the history of human warfare produced “scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday.”

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, now a Republican presidential candidate, told me in a recent campaign appearance in New Hampshire that we need to keep our troops in Germany and Japan 66 years after the end of World War II and 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union because Germany and Japan have militaristic cultures and would be dangerous if armed again. I asked what, then, had happened to American culture that necessitated Germany warning us of the dangers of militarism on the eve of our Iraq War. Santorum shrugged.

“Must be a bunch of damn pacifists over there now,” I suggested.

“Well, some of them are,” he agreed.

The German and Japanese people no doubt believed their respective governments when they said war was forced upon them. The American people did the same when the George W. Bush regime beat the drums for war with Iraq.

On this day, December 7, a week after only two Republican members of the U.S. Senate (Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mark Kirk of Illinois) voted against provisions of a Defense Authorization Act that would declare the “homeland” part of the worldwide “battlefield” and give the President power to lock up terror suspects, both foreign and American citizens, indefinitely and without charge or trial, perhaps it is time Republican conservatives realized that the greatest threat to American life and liberty comes not from Baghdad, Seoul, or Tehran, nor even from the frenzied minds of al-Qaeda terrorists. It comes from our own government in Washington, D.C. As Barry Goldwater said during the height of the Cold War, “Sometimes I fear centralized power in Washington, D.C. more than I fear Moscow.”

Sometimes it appears the old Stalinist regime is operating again under new management, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. National Review and The Weekly Standard fit in quite nicely as the new Pravda and Izvestia respectively.

Reprinted from The New American with permission of the author.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

The Best of Jack Kenny

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This morning I awoke and sat here at my word processor and tried to remember what it was that was supposed to make this day special for so many New Hampshire Republicans.

Oh, yeah! Right. John McCain is favoring us with a visit. In my mind’s ear, I hear the voice of Danny Kadingo, a reluctant Marine in Vietnam, skipping around the mess hall as he heralded the pending arrival of some self-important member of the brass.

"The general is coming today, today! The general is coming, hooray! Hooray!"

Hey, is this a big deal or what? McCain is coming to New Hampshire. To Saint Anselm College on the outskirts of Manchester, the state’s largest city. It is such a big deal that none of us is allowed to drive over there or park our cars anywhere near the place. To get to the McCain rally, you’re supposed to drive over to a mall parking lot a few miles away and take shuttle bus over to the college. And for a 9 a.m. rally, you’re supposed to arrive at that mall parking lot at 6:30 a.m.

Imagine that! Two and half hours before the event you have to be there in the mall parking lot at the break of dawn. Wait for the bus. Wait to get over there. Get there and wait for McCain’s arrival. Wait to notice how old he looks. Wait to notice that wife Cindy does not look as young as she does on television. Wait to see which Boston or network newsperson or camera guy is going to block your view. Then, finally, listening to all the rhetoric, waiting for a single sensible thought and remembering the story Ronald Reagan used to tell about a kid opening a closet on Christmas morning and cheerfully digging through the pile of manure he found there in the expectation that, "There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!"

Listening to McCain, will anyone hear a thought or a summons to a thought? Will it be scary? You might recall the musical non-thought he attempted to sing when he said, "Bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

"There’s going to be more wars," McCain said matter-of-factly. There is? Great! Vote for McCain in the expectation of more wars. How many? Pick a number. Just be at a rally on Election Night, cheering for a McCain-Palin victory.

"Four more wars! Four more wars!"

But today’s rally is like the Thirty Years War. From the time the McCaniacs arrive at the mall parking lot to the time they get back to it will be like, what, six hours? What is this supposed to be, the Super Bowl? Will there be instant replay in case McCain fumbles a line on the way to the end zone? Will there be Frito Lays commercials? How about Bob Dole pitching Viagra? How about Bob Dole pitching Elizabeth Dole, the senator from North Carolina?

"Sure, how far do you want me to throw her?"

That’s okay, Bob. I think the voters of North Carolina will take care of that.

But back to New Hampshire. All those hours to listen to McCain say nothing we haven’t heard him say already — over and over again. He is not going to reinvent himself now, not with less than two weeks until Election Day. Even Nixon didn’t do that. And who can remember how many times there was a "New Nixon" to disbelieve between 1952 and 1968? Hubert Humphrey was rightly contemptuous of a man so hollow and so plastic he could reinvent himself repeatedly to advance his political ambitions. The procession of new Nixons brings to mind a song country singer Tanya Tucker recorded some years ago:

"Don’t Believe My Heart Can Stand Another You."

Anyway, all these hours spent waiting for Sen. Goodguy. It reminds me of what Sam Goldwyn supposedly said when first offered the chance to make a movie of Margaret Mitchell’s "Gone With the Wind."

"Who the hell wants to see a movie about the Civil War? And the goddamn losers, fer Crissake!"

This time McCain is coming with Secret Service, augmented by local police and campus security and, perhaps, the Arizona Desert Patrol. It was easier to see McCain in April of ’07. It was easier to see Obama just last month. It was probably easier to see Elvis. It’s still easier, perhaps, to hear Billy Graham. I would bet it was easier to see and hear Jesus. Ask Bob Dole. He was there. He remembers.

Now I will do a lot for my country and even for my checkered career. But my days of "Hurry up and wait" are over. I am not going to skip my morning coffee, leave my warm, semi-comfortable apartment before dawn to go and stand and wait at a parking lot to wait for a bus to take me to a campus to wait to see and hear John McCain. Been there, done that.

That’s the advantage of experience. I think I’ll wait for the "Saturday Night Live" version.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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A little over a week ago, I ventured from my warm dry apartment out into the rain and walked a few short blocks to the building housing our local Police Athletic League for a scheduled press conference about something hailed as good news for the city of Manchester, NH. New funding had been authorized for Operation Streetsweeper, which is supposed to make us all safer by ridding the streets of Manchester of drugs and drug dealers. I had some questions I was prepared to ask — more prepared, I expected, than the politicians would be to answer them.

The mayor was going to be there and the chief of police, of course, the state’s attorney general and Major Domo himself, U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee and unofficial chairman of the Committee of Fiscal Conservatives Seeking to Fund Everything Imaginable, Albeit in Extreme Moderation. Yes, I was looking forward to questioning the good Dr. Gregg on the Drug Wars.

Why, you might ask, do I refer to the senator as "Dr." Gregg? Well he has an honorary Ph.D. from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, awarded by that small Benedictine school after Dr. Judd obtained the millions necessary to donate a former U.S. Army Reserve building to the college, renovate it and turn it into New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. The good monks of Saint Anselm pray for Dr. Judd daily, while chanting, "Praise the Lord and Pass the Federal Largesse."

But the $5 or $6 million or so that the Jolly Juddster corralled for that little project pales in comparison with the bacon (not "pork," mind you) he has brought home for the University of New Hampshire at Durham and Plymouth State University, two institutions of higher learning that have each named a building in honor of New Hampshire’s most famous fiscal conservative. Saving money doesn’t get a politician memorialized in stone. Hell, it doesn’t even make for a good press release.

But Gregg remains undefeated in New Hampshire politics and will either retire that way or die in office. He has even become so bold as to publicly defend earmarks. So I was prepared to ask him if the funding for Operation Streetsweeper is an earmark. That would have been interesting, because the presumptive 2008 presidential nominee of the Grand Old Party, John McCain, is famous for his opposition to earmarks.

But the Republican mayor of Manchester, the Hon. Frank Guinta, is fond of them, at least some of them. For no sooner did the Democrats gain a majority in Congress than did His Honor, the mayor, bewail the loss of the earmark for the Streetsweeper program. I mean, hot damn, what’s the point of becoming mayor of a whole damn city if you can’t have the fun and excitement of knocking down doors and making dynamic entry into people’s homes to find out if they have drugs.

Well, when I got to the PAL building at the appointed time, it was locked up and there were no officials in sight — only me and a reporter and cameraman from WBZ TV in Boston. (It was a slow news day.) The event had been postponed. We had not received the word. We returned, undaunted, to our other pursuits. Drug war called on account of rain.

But it wasn’t really the rain that occasioned the postponement of this historic event in the War on Drugs. The reason, I later learned, was that Sen. Gregg couldn’t make it because there was an important vote coming up in the senate and he had to stay there and vote for God’s sake! Accepting his accolades as drug warrior would have to wait.

That was too bad. I wanted to ask Jolly Judd about earmarks and the War on Drugs. Earmarks are funny things, you know, when we are talking about things like the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. But you can neither name nor imagine a "war" that Republicans are not eager to fund. Well, okay, maybe they were not all that enthusiastic about LBJ’s War on Poverty — not, anyway, until they discovered that, like a transportation bill, the War on Poverty would bring lots of federal dollars to every congressional district in America.

So just call a spending bill a "war" on something and you will likely have overwhelming Republican support. Republicans like wars — from a safe distance, of course. I dare to guess that Jolly Judd has been no closer to a drug raid than he has been to a combat operation. Neither is likely to occur in his neighborhood.

That is why he so blithely supports whatever overseas war any Republican president wishes to wage. The bombs will not fall anywhere near Judd’s home. Neither his wife nor children nor any of his grateful constituents will be anywhere near the "collateral damage." And that is why he supports the War on Drugs. Neither Judd’s home nor the homes of anyone in his social circle will be affected.

Others of us are not so fortunate. I live, as I said, just a few blocks from the Police Athletic League building where the press conference would have been held. If I could have steered the discussion toward earmarks, I would have pointed out that one of the virtues of the "bridge to nowhere" is that it does not run through my apartment. Operation Streetsweeper did once, though there was no warrant to search my residence. The warrant, I was later told, authorized a search of the apartment next to mine. Mine was a convenient shortcut.

Or the street sweepers simply made a wrong turn. And a "dynamic entry" through the front door, which did not lead to the targeted apartment, but by way of mine. Dynamic entry meant broken glass and things strewn about in the hallway. All of which was still there when the police had gone. Operation Streetsweeper has no clean-up detail.

I was not home the day the police came trespassing. I later said if I had known they were coming, I might have tidied the place up a bit. But they may come back, thanks to the funding Sen. Gregg has obtained. I don’t know what I should do to protect my home. If I had Sen. Gregg’s money, I might hire security guards. I would not know, of course, who their other clients were or what their sidelines were. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were to hire drug dealers to protect me and my home from the storm troopers we pay with our tax dollars to protect us from drug dealers?

Maybe we could call all that an "economic stimulus package."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

Jack Kenny Archives

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You wouldn’t think a man who had been shot down over enemy territory, captured and subjected to torture and deprivation for five and a half years would later be described as having led a charmed life. Yet one might be tempted to say that about former Navy pilot and Vietnam veteran John S. McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona and heir apparent to the Bush dynasty as presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for president of the United States.

McCain reminds one of the saying, "Get a reputation as an early riser and you may sleep ’til noon thereafter." Get a reputation as a straight talker and you may prevaricate thereafter. But considering the future he will face if he is successful in his quest for the White House, a little deviation from the truth may well be a psychological necessity for McCain.

Try putting yourself in the place of semi-honest John. Imagine being greeted at the White House by Bush the "Dubya," son of the New World Order. Imagine being taken on a tour of the place, the grand tour ending at a ledger book showing annual deficits in the range of $400 billion or more, extending through the "out years," not only as far as the eye can see, but as far as the mind can imagine. Then you get to look at the war projections. Casualties continue to mount in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no end in sight and no plan for an end. And the report from Gen. Westmore — I mean Petraeus — says the gains in Iraq are fragile. The losses, meanwhile, are substantial and permanent.

Then you would view the economy tumbling into a recession, Social Security heading toward a cliff, costs mounting at everything from the Veterans Administration to the Department of Education. Nearly everyone, you learn, hates the No Child Left behind Act, yet no one knows how to either mend or end it. Gay Marriage is breaking out all over. Antiwar and antiabortion activists are crowding each other out on the Mall. The border problems are only getting worse. Meanwhile, the courts are interfering with the powers of the surveillance state that Bush, Cheney et al., have created.

Earmarks are multiplying in Congress, despite all your lectures against them. Worse, the senior senator from Alaska has an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office of how many bridges to nowhere could be built for less than it will cost to stay in Iraq for another ten, let alone 100 years. And the price of gasoline is heading toward $5 a gallon.

You’re beginning to feel your age and some members of Congress are clamoring for a bailout of the makers of Geritol, as well as increased subsidies for seniors dependent on Viagra. Everything is falling apart, you realize, and then the president turns to you and says…

"Soon, John, all this will be yours." Guess what. There’ll be a bull market on Pepto Bismol.

Or maybe we need to invest in ulcer medicine. Or sedatives. McCain is known to have a fiery temper and the coming years will create an abundance of acid indigestion for any president. So with his head spinning, it is not surprising that Sen. McCain may forget each day what the previous day’s "straight talk" line was.

John started in ’02 and ’03 backing the policy of the Bush-Cheney gang and said, sure, by God, let’s go to war, have regime change, get those weapons of mass destruction, have our cakewalk and get it over with. Then when things started going badly in Iraq, he became the No. 1 critic of Rummy the Great at Defense and was out front in calling for "the surge" of U.S. troops in the country. (I mean Iraq, of course. We never need troops to defend our country.) More "boots on the ground" were needed. So whereas he once supported unquestioningly a U.S. military operation that Rummy had said would last "weeks, not months," McCain is now in it for the long haul, which could be 50 or 100 years, or a thousand or a million. Since we already have bases all over the world and a U.S. overseas military base is even closer than a federal domestic program to eternal life, what difference does it make?

And while our flyboy hero was once opposed to the use of torture, he has more recently opposed a bill to ban the use of waterboarding by the CIA. And even after the war party’s favorite "Independent," Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, corrected him on his misstatement about which gang of "extremists" Iran is training, "Honest" John said it was al Qaeda a couple more times anyway, just to make sure the misstatement got fair play.

After opposing the Bush tax cuts because they exacerbate the deficits, McCain has become a firm, nay fierce, advocate of making those tax cuts permanent, now that the deficit has reached a robust $400 billion. And, of course, Sen. McCain has withdrawn his support for an amnesty plan on immigration that has been so unpopular with the Republican base.

Having deliberately and continuously distorted Mitt Romney’s statement about a timetable for withdrawal, accusing his former GOP rival of "waving the white flag of surrender," McCain and his surrogates now complain that the senator’s "100 years" statement about staying in Viet — er, Iraq, has been taken out of context.

Let’s face it, McCain has his own timetable for withdrawal from "Vietraq" and he has carelessly made it public. We have been there five years now. So if we take McCain at his word, we may conclude that if peace and stability for Iraq and its neighbors have not been achieved in another 95 years, McCain will likely remove the troops, anyway. He will "cut and run." He will "wave the white flag of surrender." But he will want to do so in a way that is not "precipitous." He won’t want to give either the terrorists or the Democrats the opportunity to outdo the GOP in "supporting the troops" by starting another war. ("All the wars of the 20th Century have been Democrat wars," Bob Dole reminded us.) McCain will be very old in 95 years, so we hope he will be careful. We hope he doesn’t do anything rash that could lead to an outbreak of peace.

Maybe he should consult with Sen. Dole.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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I read with keen interest in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that former Congressman Bob Barr, R-GA, may be considering running for president as the candidate of the Libertarian Party. Then I read with growing disgust the comments posted on the AJC blog, condemning Barr for even thinking of it. No, we have to get on board McCain’s "Straight Talk Express." To save America. From whom? Why, from the Democrats, of course!

You remember the Democrats. That party of big government, big spending, always squandering American blood and treasure on foreign soil. (Remember Vice Presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1976: "All the wars o’ the 20th Century have been Democrat wars!") Surely, we must rally behind the Republican ticket to keep America safe and strong!

As we (some of us) have been doing for decades. It will be 40 years ago this fall that I picked up a copy of National Review with the cover story, "A plea to conservatives from Barry Goldwater." Goldwater’s plea was that we not "throw away" our votes by casting our ballots for American Party candidate George C. Wallace of Alabama. Because many of us heeded Goldwater’s plea, Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

From that time to the present day, a Republican has been in the White House for 28 of the past 40 years. Ronald Reagan also enjoyed the support of a Republican Senate for six of his eight years. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress from 1995-2006, including the first six of President George W. Bush’s eight years in the Oval Office. Jimmy Carter made no Supreme Court appointments in his single term, so ten consecutive nominees seated on the Supreme Court were the choices of Republican presidents. What have we achieved with all this Republican success?

Are you proud, conservatives, of our great Republican annual deficits of $400 billion (conservatively estimated) and our national debt of nine (or is it ten now?) TRILLION dollars? Are you proud of a government willing to go to war at the drop of a hat or the tilt of a turban? Are you glad we are paying for our wars and our vast military empire through our increasing financial dependence on Communist China, among others? Aren’t you glad that our wars in the oil rich Middle East have driven oil prices above $100 a barrel?

Aren’t you happy we have established the principle under this administration that the president has the power to lock up American citizens indefinitely, without trial, without charges, without due process? Won’t you be delighted when the next Democratic president (Hillary Clinton?) builds on that precedent?

Don’t you feel so much safer now that the same administration that apparently ignored warnings of a terrorist attack prior to 9-11 now claims that to prevent another one it needs to listen to our international phone calls without a warrant? Aren’t you glad the allegedly conservative party is about to nominate a candidate for president whose contempt for the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment has been expressed in various ways, most ominously in features of his McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act?

Ah, but Obama (or Clinton) will pack the federal courts with liberal judges! Uh-huh. And we may be sure the Republican nominee won’t? Amnesia is fast becoming the leading cause of mental dysfunction among Republicans. Sure, Reagan gave us Scalia and Rehnquist as chief justice. Bush ’41 gave us Clarence Thomas and Bush ’43 nominated Roberts and Alito, who, so far, appear pretty good. But who gave us Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, the author of the Roe v. Wade decision, along with Lewis Powell? Nixon. Who gave us John Paul Stevens (Ford) Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy? (Reagan) David Souter? (Bush ’41). And once Clinton came into office, who were such good sports about the whole thing that they whisked through the nominations of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer?

The Republican members of the Senate, of course, only three of whom voted against Ginsburg. And that was after the Democrats had "Borked" Judge Robert Bork and nearly derailed the nomination of Justice Thomas. If the Republicans believed a fraction of their own rhetoric about the importance of confirming "strict constructionists" to the high court, they would have worked to block the Ginsburg and Breyer appointments.

Time and again, at every turn, the Republican Party has betrayed its conservative faithful. So much so that the name "Republican" is now virtually synonymous with betrayal. But don’t expect lobotomized Republican voters to notice. They are too busy being frightened by the Democratic bogeyman.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Along with, I am sure, millions of other Americans, I was appalled that anyone had the tastelessness, the insensitivity and the unmitigated gall to ask Chelsea Clinton about her father’s notorious affair with infamous intern Monica Lewinksy. Most of us agreed with the former first daughter when she said her family’s internal struggle with that affair is none of the questioner’s business.

Okay, say it again. A famous person, the offspring of both a former president and a presidential candidate no less, publicly told a nosy questioner that some things are none of the public’s business. One sensed America, embarrassed by the question, breathed a sigh of relief.

It is not that America is in love with Chelsea Clinton. But we still have some regard for privacy — or what is left of privacy when politicians like Chelsea’s parents have done their best to diminish it.

It is ironic that at a time in our history when we have radically broadened the legal claims of privacy, we appear to have largely emptied it of content. The Clintons and others at the apex of power in America seem to have little regard for our privacy. Their compassion won’t allow it. They feel too much of our pain. Your health and mine is their business. Not just your actual health right now (I feel fine, thank you), but your insurance against future illness is the government’s business.

Your sex life is the government’s business. What? You didn’t know that? Why do you think the new prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program covers Viagra? Why do you suppose there are federally funded and state-mandated sex education programs in your children’s schools? Why do you think homosexual "rights" is a public cause? What people do in the privacy of their own bedroom is for you to know about, care about, empathize over. It is for candidates to talk about in public debates. It is an issue, man. What isn’t?

Who would have thought a few short decades ago that the right of people to their own sexual orientation and activity is so private a matter that it must be adjudicated by the United States Supreme Court, lest state laws touching the subject remain out of touch with the zeitgeist? And, of course, abortion, which used to be unsafe, illegal and rare, is such a privacy issue that it has been in the public crosshairs continually since the Supreme Court made it a federal constitutional issue 35 years ago.

Today, homosexuality is such a private matter that we must know not just a celebrity’s sexual orientation, but even our neighbor’s if our neighbor feels the need to assert his "gay pride." It’s such a private matter that we must change our public laws regarding marriage to accommodate the "alternative lifestyle."

Abortion became a "constitutional right," because it is covered by an undefined but judicially discerned right to privacy. It is so private that every nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court is asked to publicly pledge his support to a "woman’s right to choose." And there must be public support of this private right in the form of federal funding for it, according to the abortion "rights" advocates. So if you are privately, personally opposed to abortion, you still have the obligation to support it publicly with your tax dollars. Apparently, our government has decided that a public benefit accrues from the exercise of the "freedom of choice" when it is exercised in a way approved by those who are pro-abortion. (I choose to call "pro-choice" by its real name.) There is a benefit, in other words, to the brutal killing of an average of 4,000 helpless infants a day in progressive, compassionate America.

Both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama support federal funding for abortion. I would guess that the former first daughter, out stumping for her mother, does, too. Would she have an abortion? Well that’s not our business, is it? Should we pay for it if she were poor and underprivileged and not the child of the Clintons? Well, that’s the government’s business, isn’t it?

I can’t imagine Chelsea Clinton telling the government to mind its own business, even in a Republican administration. Can you?

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The stars must have been in just the right alignment. Or it was, if you prefer, a perfect storm. New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta, a Republican, and the New Hampshire Union Leader (R-Confusion) were all on the same side of a smoking controversy. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, the sky was falling. Or the bottom was out of the universe. Whatever.

No doubt "The World Is Too Much With Us," as the great Willie Wordsworth wrote. The governor and the mayor both have seemingly intractable budget problems confronting them. And the Union Leader must cheerlead a losing war in Iraq, battle the menace of mandatory seat belt bills, beat back the broad-based taxers and spenders, make John McCain appear credible and protect the glory of the Son of God from the depravity of the "Dilbert" comic strip, all at the same time. So it is, perhaps, understandable that when the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to decriminalize possession of a small amount of marijuana, the statewide daily joined the governor and the Queen City mayor in flipping their righteous, solemn and respectable, all-American lids.

The representatives on Planet Concord conspired to make the possession of a quarter of an ounce or less of marijuana a non-criminal offense. It would be a violation, punishable by a $200 fine. There would be no jail time and no criminal record for, say, an 18-year-old, found with a quarter of an ounce or less of the "wacky tobaccy" on his or her person. The youth would not lose eligibility for federal assistance for college loans, certain jobs and other benefits and opportunities forfeited by convicted criminals.

So what did the governor, the mayor and the righteous Republican newspaper have to say about that? Well, they said it was terrible. The representatives had obviously taken leave of their senses. "What were they smoking?" the Union Leader wanted to know. Marijuana is addictive, said the oracle at William Loeb Drive, where truth telling apparently is not. The paper, the "guv" and Hizzoner at City Hall all wailed that the vote sent "the wrong message" to our young people. Mayor Guinta even called upon Manchester School Department spokesman David Scannell, a state "rep" who voted for the decriminalization, to quit his job. Our leaders clearly demonstrated this was no time for panic in New Hampshire. It is always, however, time for paranoia.

For the record, marijuana is not addictive, though it can be habit-forming, like writing misleading editorials. The Union Leader, in this instance, spoke not from a desire not to deceive, but to preserve ignorance untrammeled by the trespass of reason. Indeed, if ignorance were truly bliss, the Union Leader would have died from joy long ago. But they are all sincere. The governor, mayor and the editors all want to save the youth of New Hampshire from the evils of marijuana. The representatives want to save the same youths from the excesses of marijuana laws defended by people who have for decades lived in fear of Haight-Ashbury, hippies, homosexuals, flower children and Hell’s Angels. For many of us, this writer included, marijuana is indelibly associated in our minds with the radical counter-culture of the 1960′s.

So what is the answer? More people, especially young, poor and black people in our jails and prisons? Gee, how is that for a winning platform? Perhaps the state Senate will kill the bill and Governor Lynch won’t have to. It’s too bad. I wanted to see the governor run for reelection on a plan to increase state revenues and balance the budget by putting more kids into Prison Industries, where they can all learn useful trades. That will provide the added advantage of decreasing the state’s college population and thus, possibly, relieving the increasing pressure for more state funding for higher education.

Since the United States already leads all nations in prison population, it sounds like an all-American idea. What better way to crush the weed and grow the economy, while encouraging prison-building, one of the fastest growing industries in America? Don’t go away, folks. Before it’s over, the 21st Century may see students studying American history to evaluate the theory of "devolution." Or as the young people of today might describe the law of entropy:

"The universe is, like, running down, man. Y’know?"

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Quick, what is the largest religious denomination in America? Chances are many of you will say the Catholics. But being of that communion, I know the Catholic Church has maintained through the centuries that she is not a denomination of a larger Christian Church, encompassing the Church of Rome, the Church of England, the Orthodox churches and the various Protestant sects. The Catholic Church is "the" church, with the Church Militant the visible body of Christ on earth and the pope, or Vicar of Christ, as its visible head. However loathsome the comparison may be in some ways, the Church’s relationship to the "separated brethren" may be thought of as similar to the relationship of the People’s Republic of China to Taiwan. Beijing insists there is but one China of which Taiwan is a part.

But even if we were to consider, for the sake of discussion, the Catholic Church as a denomination, it would still not be the biggest. The reason has to do with something I observed Good Friday morning while gazing upon one of the Stations of the Cross. It was the Fifth Station, the one depicting the scene in which, "Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus Carry the Cross."

The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all tell of Simon of Cyrene, who comes onto the scene by chance and is compelled to bear the cross. But taken together their accounts leave it unclear whether Simon was forced to carry the cross with or for Jesus. In other words, was Simon bearing the cross alone, at least for part of the trek to Calvary? Or were he and Jesus carrying it together?

I believe every artist’s rendition I have seen shows it as a joint effort of Jesus and Simon. Most depict Simon carrying the cross behind Jesus, as indicated in Saint Luke’s gospel: "And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenean, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross that he might bear it after Jesus." (Luke 23:26)

But the miniature sculpture I was looking at this Good Friday morning had Simon near the front of the cross, with Jesus behind him. One other feature I noticed: Christ’s hands were presented as tied together around the beam he was carrying. In that scene he could not, humanly speaking, let go of the cross.

Now, Simon is an interesting character in a number of ways. Clearly the fact that three of the four Gospel writers mention him by name and the name of his town, while two of them also tell us the name of his children, indicates that his cameo role in this scene is considered significant. It is also worth noting that Simon did not help Jesus voluntarily. The Roman soldiers "laid hold" of him or "compelled" him to carry the cross. One would think that had they not done so, Simon would have been content to continue on his way. Or he might have stopped for a while and simply viewed the spectacle, as so many others were doing.

Luke tells us that as Jesus started off with the cross "there followed after him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him." (v. 27). The evangelist appears to be drawing a distinction between the "great company of people" and the women who were "wailing and lamenting" the cruel fate that had befallen the rabbi from Galilee. The "great company" likely included many passersby and curiosity seekers who came along to watch the spectacle, as the Roman rulers must have wished. Why have a public execution after all, if not to make a spectacle of the executed?

By that time Roman had occupied Palestine for roughly a century. Those who dared oppose, or were even suspected of opposing, the rule of the Romans faced a terrible fate. A few decades before the crucifixion of Jesus, some two thousand Jews were executed in a single day. It is not surprising, then, that there is no record of anyone trying to stop the cruel and inhumane spectacle of a badly beaten Jesus forced to carry his cross on the way to his execution.

One might ask how we compare, we citizens of another empire, which chooses not to call itself that. We have not been subjected — not yet, anyway — to the kind of tyranny that was the everyday fare of the ancient world. In the land of the free, in 21st Century America, Jesus would have been read his "Miranda rights," been provided with a lawyer right away, given a fair trial and had recourse to legal appeals. Unless of course, some modern Pilate designated him an "enemy combatant" and decided to hold him without charges and without trial for years, without any widespread protest by his countrymen.

Then, perhaps, after years of solitary confinement, a trial could be staged in which he could be convicted, based, perhaps, on fingerprints found on an application form for a training camp run by an organization lately designated as an enemy of our country. This is all speculation, of course. There’s not telling how the trial of Jesus might have been handled in our enlightened age.

But I can’t help wondering how we, the bystanders, the "great company of people" might have reacted. We need not have seen it in person, of course. We might have caught reports of it on the evening news or followed sporadic accounts of it in our daily newspapers. A few hardy souls might have protested, but chances are most Americans would not have lost any sleep over it. It seems safe to say that not many would be moved to write a letter to the editor about it. Relatively few people ever speak out publicly. Of those who do, many hold their fire for a truly significant occurrence, as when the local newspaper, for whatever reason, suspends publication of their favorite comic strip for a certain period of time.

But the vast majority of us do not speak up — not when our nation is prosecuting a war of aggression in a far-off land. Not when our constitutional rights are increasingly violated by what is arguably the most lawless administration in our nation’s history. Not even when, under a judge-made constitutional "right," babies in, or even partially outside, the womb are killed in the United States at the rate of 4,000 a day. Nor even when the House of Representatives in my state (New Hampshire) votes down a bill to require the notification of the child’s parents before an abortion may be performed on a minor. None of these things have produced the flurry of letters to the editor recently published in my local paper over the temporary suspension of publication of a certain comic strip. In our day, and in my state, Patrick Henry’s cry of "Give me liberty or give me death!" has been supplanted by, "Give us Dilbert or we’ll raise hell — and squawk a lot, too."

But at least those in the loyal order of the Defenders of Dilbert speak up about something. Most people never do. Which brings me back to the question of which is the largest denomination in America. For me, comedian Flip Wilson answered that question more than 30 years ago. In one of his skits, he identified himself as a "Jehovah’s Bystander." What’s that, you ask?

"We’s like the Witnesses," he explained, "only we don’t want to get involved." Sounds like a supermajority to me.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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There is an increasingly common theme running through the rhetoric of Republican candidates for elective office and their hangers-on and cheerleaders in the press. The theme is that Democrats can’t or won’t protect and defend the United States from those who would do us harm.

Historically, this represents quite a turnaround. Once upon a time Republicans attacked Democrats for being excessively interventionist and getting us into one war after another. Back then the Democrats were too warlike. Even the post-McGovern Democratic Party, having lost in a landslide in 1972 with an outright antiwar candidate, was believed susceptible to the bewitching sound of war drums. In the very next election, in 1976, Bob Dole, then the running mate of President Gerald Ford warned that, "All the wars of the 20th Century have been Democrat wars." I guess the muscular GOP, having recently presided over a rout of America in Vietnam, was warning us that those wimpy Democrats would get us into another war.

Indeed, one of the tributes America has paid to war since the Grand Old Party got over its grand old isolationism is that we have given the case for war, however flimsy and fabricated, bipartisan support. That is why Sen. Hillary Clinton, in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, is rather suddenly having a hard time selling her message that she is ready to lead "from Day One." Her rival, Sen. Barack Obama, in suggesting it is "more important to be right from Day One," has made much hay from the fact that Clinton has been wrong from the start on the Iraq war. And it goes back even further than her vote in October of 2002 in favor of authorizing the president to wage a preemptive or, more accurately, a preventive war against Iraq. Oh, hell, let’s just call it what it is. Hillary Clinton and the vast majority of her cohorts, Democrat and Republican, in the craven Congress authorized a war of aggression.

Prior to that the Clinton administration, all eight years of which, Sen. Clinton includes in her "35 years of experience," convinced a compliant Republican Congress to make "regime change" the official U.S. policy on Iraq. And President Bill Clinton conducted bombing raids on Iraq a number of times, absent a specific or even general authorization of military action by Congress. So what Sen. Clinton has lately been calling "Bush’s war" in Iraq might fairly and accurately be described as the Clinton-Bush-Clinton war.

And woe to anyone who opposes it. And woe again to anyone who opposes giving the commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Chiang Kai George, all the powers he wants to monitor phone calls without warrant and throw people into prison and hold them there indefinitely, without charges and without trial, if he deems them to be "unlawful enemy combatants." Anyone who opposes any of that must be some kind of "Islamo-fascist," or at least a sympathizer or dupe of same.

So now a group called Defenders of Democracy has targeted a number of Democrats in the House of Representatives for allowing the expiration of temporary legislation authorizing the president and others in the executive branch to monitor (eavesdrop on) international phone calls without going to the FISA court for a warrant as the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States require.

The Protect America Act, as passed by the Senate, also grants immunity from lawsuits to the telephone companies that turned private phone call records over to federal investigators in violation of federal law. Absent the retroactive immunity, the phone companies face potentially billions of dollars in legal fees and damages.

So if you don’t go along with all of that you are undermining American security, according to the self-proclaimed "Defenders of Democracy."

Fergus Cullen, Republican state chairman in New Hampshire, has thrown in his two cents (allowing for inflation) worth by echoing that charge in particular against first-term Democrat Carol Shea-Porter, who represents New Hampshire’s First District in the U.S. House.

"As much as she would like to pretend otherwise," Cullen charged in a recent press release, "Shea-Porter and House Democrats have left the US intelligence community without all the necessary tools to protect the nation."

This would be laughable were it not so serious. On the one hand, Republicans have been boasting that no terrorist attack has been carried out on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001, proving what a good job the Bush administration is doing in protecting us. (Excuse me, but on whose watch did the first foreign attack in the continental United States since the war of 1812 occur?) At the same time, they tell us that same administration cannot continue to protect us unless the FISA law that has been in effect from the late 1970′s until six months ago is overridden. The same White House gang that did effectively nothing upon receiving the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, warning of a major al Queda attack in the United States, now claims it will protect us by exercising the authority to listen, without warrants, on our international phone calls.

And, of course, they and their flunkies among the political distraction groups and on "hawk" radio will smear those, mostly Democrats, who oppose that. Wimpy apologists for the rule of law and the Bill of Rights are naïve, weak in the knees, not strong like the muscular Republicans when it comes to defending the nation.

How many times have you heard a Republican say, "Thank God Al Gore was not the president on September 11"? Yeah, right. We couldn’t trust Uncle Albert to act decisively in a crisis. He might have remained hidden away for several hours, with no one knowing where he was, while the mayor of New York became, by default, the symbol of America responding, as best we could, to a horrible attack. Not being smart like the Bush-Cheney gang, goofy old Gore might even have invaded the wrong country, like, say, Iraq.

And we might never have heard of the Defenders of Democracy. And then we might never have had the opportunity to ask ourselves this question:

What would defenders of totalitarianism sound like?

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Planet Punditry has been abuzz these past few days over the alleged plagiarism committed by Sen. Barack Obama in a campaign speech in which he copied Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s use of quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr. Thomas Jefferson, FDR and JFK without crediting Gov. Patrick.

That’s right. So I guess if I were to come across a particularly effective use of a quotation from Patrick Henry by a writer on this web site, I would be obliged to say: "As Bill Huff (let us say) said, Patrick Henry said…" And then if you were to read my essay and wanted to use that same quotation, you would be obliged to say:

"As Jack Kenny noted, Bill Huff cited those unforgettable words of Patrick Henry, u2018Give me liberty or…’"

Give me a break!

In case you missed it, Sen. Charisma was responding to repeated claims by Mme. Hillarious that Sen. Charisma offers the voters of America nothing but words — beautiful, noble, high-minded oratory, with nothing but speeches and crowd excitement to show as accomplishments. Apparently, the same charge had been made against Patrick by his eminently forgettable Republican opponent in 2006. So Captain Charisma responded in the same way, citing the importance of "mere words."

"u2018I have a dream.’ Just words? u2018We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words? u2018Ask not what your country can do for you’…" And so on.

Now, because Obama did not credit Patrick, the Clinton camp is charging, "plagiarism." It may get pettier than that and probably will, but that’s bad enough for now.

Now it turns out that in his first Inaugural Address, President Bill Clinton employed the words of another without attribution. As Sam Roberts pointed out in Wednesday’s New York Times (See how I am carefully attributing things?), the new president began his speech that January day with a reference to the "depth of winter," quickly followed by the invocation of a "spring reborn in the world’s oldest democracy, that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America."

Never mind, for the moment, the hubris involved in the notion that President Clinton, the choice of a minority of those voting, was charged with the mission to "reinvent America." The point Mister Roberts (whom I cite once again) was making is that those words were, as Clinton later recalled, found on a page in a typewriter of the Rev. Tim Healey, a friend of the new president’s and a former mentor at Georgetown, a Jesuit university. Roberts wrote that Clinton said (See, I’m still not plagiarizing) the words were in a letter the priest was writing to Clinton at the time of his fatal heart attack. (The Clintons have that effect on a lot of people.) The priest was, so Roberts said that Clinton said, offering some suggestions for the Inaugural Address.

Now was Rev. Healey acting as a volunteer speechwriter or was he writing as an authority, who expected to be cited as such if and when his thoughts and words were used in the address? Well, Mr. Roberts quoted Jimmy Breslin, who, Mr. Roberts said, wrote in Breslin’s Newsday column a few days after the Inaugural:

"When Healy sent Clinton that phrase it was with the idea that he would be alive and that he would hear Clinton say, u2018In the words of the Rev. Tim Healy…’"

Well, as Bob Dole, President Clinton’s vanquished challenger in the 1996 election might say, "Whatever." (I apologize for being unable to find the original source for "Whatever.")

Now back to that business about "reinventing America." That one slipped by me at the time. I know that early in his first term, the Boy Wonder of Arkansas delegated to Vice Predator Al Gore the task of "Reinventing Government," a big enough job. (I loved Joe Sobran’s typically deft response: "How about reinventing freedom?") But I didn’t know King Bubba himself was planning to "reinvent America." But maybe that’s the same thing. For the Clintons and others of their mindset, America and the American government are pretty much the same thing. There is not much room for any aspect of America that is not supervised, subsidized and legitimized by the government.

That includes, need I say, the "right to choose" abortion, which right exists and may be found, say the wizards of the high court, in the penumbras of other, enumerated rights that point to an unspecific, unarticulated "right of privacy." So one woman’s act in privacy, carried out in conjunction with her physician and anyone else she chooses to include in the decision, is something you and I must pay for, even if one or both of us believe it is an unjust and immoral act — namely the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. And that is true even if you or I or both of us believe that abortion is to the late 20th and early 21st Century what slavery was to an earlier era: something that caused Thomas Jefferson to say (as cited by Bartlett and others), "I tremble for my country when I know that God is just."

That’s what the "right to privacy" and "freedom of choice" has come to mean to people of a mindset shared by Clinton, Obama and nearly every Democratic office holder above the rank of state representative (and most of the state "reps," too). In fact, the Arkansas BillHillies arrived in Washington at least 20 years too late. America had already been "reinvented" by 1993 — most memorably and dramatically, on January 22, 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

There is one thing Supreme Court decisions and speeches by presidents and candidates for president have in common: they make you hope that they live up to Mark Twain’s observation about Wagner (as cited by many before me), that "Wagner’s music is better than it sounds."

Unfortunately, these usurpers of America’s liberties are not better than they sound. If anything, they are worse, which is why the Clintons wish to play on our fears of the "silver-tongued devil." (Forgive me, but I don’t know who coined the phrase "silver-tongued devil." I do know that in the early 1970′s, singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson came out with a song, which I believe was also the title of an album, "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I." But don’t quote me on that.) Strange that the Clintons should be warning us of a slick, smooth-talking candidate for president now. Sort of like Goebbels warning against propaganda or Elizabeth Taylor warning us of the dangers of celebrating film stars who have made frequent divorce and remarriage part of their "lifestyles."

I mean it, Bob Dole is looking and sounding better all the time. No silver-tongued devil he, Bob Dole simply attributed most good things to Bob Dole — you know, Bob Dole will do this, Bob Dole won’t do that, Bob Dole is not afraid to say or do some other thing. Asked finally why he didn’t simply say "I," Bob Dole said (as quoted in the New York Times and elsewhere) "You get your name out there the other way."

But Bob Dole on the campaign trail used to read aloud the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor denied by it to the States are reserved to the State respectively, or to the people." Now Dole did that with proper attribution. But if he had forgotten where he found that principle and quoted it and acted on it anyway, I would not have minded.

Would you?

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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A friend who has long grown used to thinking of me as a "right wing ideologue" regards himself, naturally, as a pragmatic liberal. Yet I believe he is, in fact, more of an ideologue than I am. Often, I have noticed, when a pet theory is slain by an inconvenient fact, he clings to the dead theory, ignoring the living fact.

For example, he continues to believe, with all misguided sincerity, that the way to reduce abortion is more birth control and more sex education. Never mind the occasional dip in the numbers and rates of abortions. Look past the year-to-year statistics and take the long view of decades. The number of abortions soared as liberal judges removed the legal barriers and birth control became more widely available (even with condoms distributed in schools now) and sex education programs proliferating at even the grade school level. Yes, the students’ education on the subject may be deficient. But for every student my friend may quote to me who thinks pregnancy cannot occur from the first incident of intercourse, I would wager there are thousands, if not millions, who “know” they must practice “safe sex,” beginning with the first "encounter." If they have not heard that message by now, they must be, as Yogi Berra might say, “blind.”

But what really brings this thought to mind that my friend prefers the dead theory to the living fact is something he said about soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee, the semi-honorable John McCain. (Yes, he is very much in the tradition of semi-honest Abe.) He said that because he has been through the horrors of war, McCain would be less likely to commit us into another war if he can avoid it.

I agree the inverse may be true: Those "chicken hawks" around Bush who planned our “cakewalk” in Iraq have, for the most part, never heard a round fired “in anger” (i.e. to kill someone in war, rather than Cheney firing at a duck or quail or whatever it was). And I do believe Sen. Clinton would be the biggest hawk we have ever had in the White House. But don’t expect McCain to be a peacekeeper. That theory may be applicable as a general rule, but we should not be blind to the exceptions. McCain is clearly an exception. Eisenhower in the White House was a peacekeeper. MacArthur might have been. But John McCain is no peacekeeper or peace seeker.

I don’t think my friend has been paying attention to what McCain has been saying. McCain boasts that he supported "the surge," seeing the need for more "boots on the ground" in Iraq. During President Clinton’s air war over Bosnia, McCain faulted the president for his unwillingness to put American "boots on the ground" in that war. No one knows for sure just where on earth Sen. McBootsonthebrain does not want American "boots on the ground."

He is willing to have us stay in Iraq 100 years. In fairness, he is not saying the war will last that long, but that we should stay there as we have been in Germany for more than 60 years and in Korea for nearly that long. But his statements about Iran are every bit as jingoistic and provocative as those of the Bush administration. And I am not just referring to his stupid and insensitive response to a question about Iran, by singing (to the tune of “Barbara Ann") “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Yes, that was a “joke” — like many of McCain’s jokes, a rather tasteless one and makes one wonder how much McCain has learned from his “experience.” We should trust this guy’s judgment?

My friend doesn’t listen to candidates debates, because “It’s all bulls**t.” If he had listened to the Republican candidates’ “bulls**t” from the ice arena at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH on June 5, he would have heard Sen. McCain and nearly all the other Republicans on stage endorse the idea of a first strike, and specifically (it was explicit in the question) a nuclear first strike against Iran. Only Ron Paul was (pardon the pun) appalled at that prospect, invoking (appropriately enough at that Catholic college) the “Just War” theory proposed by Saint Augustine, and refined and reaffirmed by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Paul served in the Air Force between Korea and Vietnam, but has nowhere near the intimate knowledge of war that McCain has. Yet he was the only genuine peace candidate in the Republican primary field.

Gen. Patton knew war, too. As World War II was winding down, he was itching for a war with Russia, apparently brushing aside the fate of Napoleon and even Hitler, whose example was right before his eyes. I loved the way that was portrayed in the movie, “Patton.” “I’ll have us a war with sons o’ bitches in no time, and I’ll make it look like they started it!”

John McCain personifies the current rise in American militarism. Still, we may be better off if McCain wins. If he is in the White House, the American public may more quickly recognize that imperialism for what it is. With Clinton in the White House, and even more so with Obama, people may be willing to delude themselves into thinking they have elected a “peace” candidate.

As the patriot Patrick Henry, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, said so many years ago, "Men cry u2018Peace!’ Peace!’ but there is no peace." Not when men with John McCain’s appetite for American "boots on the ground" are elevated to lead the most powerful nation the world has ever known.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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On Monday, February 11, I thought I might begin the week by composing a semi-respectful tribute to semi-honest Abe on the eve of his birthday. But then I figured there will be a number of others doing just that, so why send "coals to New Castle," as our British friends say.

Most historians, editors, columnists and, especially, Republicans, revere Lincoln as "our greatest president." Next they place Washington, since he was Numero Uno. Today’s Republicans, especially neocons, like to add Reagan to the pantheon. The publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader has published an editorial about President’s Day in which he sings the praises of Reagan, Washington and Lincoln — in that order. Clearly, things have gotten out of hand.

But I digress from my digression. I have decided to perform a public service by offering to readers of this website an example of how to write a semi-respectful letter to wrongheaded political columnist. The following was sent to syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker.

Dear Ms. Parker:

What follows may seem unduly harsh and not very "nice," but I have long believed that niceness is overrated. When defending the Bill of Rights, I’d rather be brutally frank — especially when defending the Bill of Rights from someone who no doubt believes she is a friend of same.

With all due respect, Ms. Parker, you just don’t “get it.” You have not even a clue to suggest to you that you are clueless. I refer to your column, appearing in this morning’s New Hampshire Union Leader under the headline. “Irrational conservatism has taken hold of some in the GOP.”

What prompted me to go right to my e-mail is this sentence, written in an apparently half-hearted defense of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and Sen. McCain’s loopy (and self-serving) notion that “purchased speech isn’t free.” You go on to say:

“When some people have greater access to ‘free speech’ by virtue of their deeper pockets, then one could fairly argue that less prosperous people are denied free speech.” Ah, so.

Yes, one cold “fairly argue” that way. One has the right to be a ninny. That is part of the meaning of “the freedom of speech.” But by that line of reasoning — I shall refrain at this point from dubbing it the Parker Doctrine — Congress, or perhaps the president or even the courts, might either shut down newspapers or strictly regulate their content because some people purchase newspapers, most of which come with editorial pages, “by virtue of their deeper pockets.” Less prosperous people can’t afford to buy a newspaper and publish their opinions to 70,000 or more people in the state of New Hampshire every day the way the publisher of The New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News does. I’m sure the publisher is happy about that, although the Union Leader, to its credit, has opposed the McCain-Feingold campaign “reform.”

But most major newspapers eagerly embraced it and have denounced the “sham issue ads” that are financed by private parties with independent expenditures. The major media moguls want the “right” people (people who look, or better yet think and sound, like them) to control the political debate and tell people what the issues are and where the candidates stand on them.

The argument often invoked by campaign finance “reformers,” that “money is not speech” is bogus. Your colleague, George Will, has made an argument that goes something like this: Suppose the First Amendment specifically guaranteed “the freedom to travel.” (I’m sure it’s somewhere in the penumbras.) Then suppose Congress passed a law limiting how much we the people may spend on airline tickets, or prohibiting private citizens from chartering aircraft. And let us assume for the sake of discussion that this is not for air safety or security reasons. Let us say the justification for such legislation is that people travel excessively or charter private aircraft “by virtue of their deeper pockets” and that less prosperous people are thus denied freedom of travel. (That’s your non sequitur, but under the First Amendment, you’re entitled to it.)

Again, let us suppose that the First Amendment said, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of travel.” Would not the act of Congress I have just described be an abridgement of the freedom to travel? Would it not then be a clear violation of the constitutional prohibition? And since the First Amendment does say, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,” how is the McCain-Feingold law not a violation of that amendment?

And what has McCain had to say — for that matter, what has Kathleen Parker had to say — about President Bush’s claim of a right to imprison indefinitely — without charges, without trial, without anything resembling due process — anyone, including an American citizen, whom he designates an "enemy combatant"? Perhaps you may show me where I am wrong, but I believe Sen. McCain, like most of the cravens in Congress, has yet to utter Word One, or even peep one, in opposition to that egregious abuse of executive power.

In short, John McCain is an EBOR — an Enemy of the Bill of Rights. If you don’t know that, then I fear I am not exaggerating when I say you are clueless about your state of cluelessness.

Finally, I hope you will at least stop expressing the McCaniac mind-set by putting quotation marks around “free speech.” That suggests it is “so-called free speech,” implying our claim to the “freedom of speech” is but another “sham issue,” being neither real nor legitimate. It’s as though I were to refer to “friend” of the Constitution Kathleen Parker.

Respectfully yours,
Jack Kenny

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Much has changed in New Hampshire and on the national political scene since the nation’s attention was focused here for our presidential primaries on January 8, which only seems like years ago. The big political story in New Hampshire now is the prosecution of 2006 Democratic congressional hopeful Gary Dodds, who is accused of faking his disappearance after an auto accident. You have to wonder why we would want to prosecute a congressional candidate for faking his disappearance. If more candidates, or better actual Congress critters, would either disappear or do a reasonably realistic imitation of a disappearance — like staying out of our sight, our hearing and our mailboxes — we might all enjoy greater peace of mind. But governments do not exist to bring us peace of mind. We can find that in old books, the Bible foremost among them.

It is amazing how quickly the candidates have fallen by the wayside. It seems like only last week that living rooms, school cafeterias and gymnasiums in New Hampshire were being filled by all kinds of people with presidential ambitions. Not only the "big name" celebrities like Hillary and Rudy and Mitt and Obama, but more or less regular Joes like Biden and a folksy Mike like Huckabee and a sturdy Sam like Kansas’s Brownback. Even a Dennis "the Menace" Kucinich, who dared to say what many of us had noticed, that the two parties look and sound an awful lot alike.

Now they are long gone and might be hard to find if we were looking for them, but we’re not. The state of New Hampshire had a hard enough time finding Dodds, against whom the charge should be not that he disappeared, but that he came back. Meanwhile, Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta, a Republican who is said to be contemplating a run for governor this year, may be having second thoughts about his decision to endorse former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for President, back when "Uncle" Rudolph was still at or near the top of the polls. That endorsement surprised many, including the Manchester mayor’s pro-life supporters who were appalled at the endorsement of the "pro-choice" Giuliani. Should he win the corner office, Gov. Giuliani may ask the state’s attorney general to investigate the disappearance of the Giuliani voters this January. Apparently, they weren’t faking.

We might better understand that disappearance if Giuliani had been endorsed by former Vice "Predator" Al Gore. Some of us remember how former Vermont Governor Howard Dean was ahead of all his Democratic rivals for the 2004 Democratic nomination when "Uncle" Albert came here and bestowed his endorsement upon Dr. Dean in December of ’03. Thereafter, the good doctor began to sink like a rock, losing in Iowa, losing in New Hampshire and dropping out soon after. Perhaps in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation, Gore passed his king-making powers to Mayor Guinta, who used them with such deadly effect on Giuliani

Now even the mighty Mitt is gone. He was spectacularly unsuccessful as a vote getter, even here in New Hampshire, next door to Massachusetts where Romney has lived for the past 30 years and where he recently had been governor for four years. I knew he was in trouble when, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Concord attorney and political veteran Tom Rath was trying to spin Romney’s win (with eight delegates) in the Wyoming Caucuses as a significant victory. As it turned out, the Mittster barely had time to bask in the glow of his win in the Maine Caucuses before he announced he was "suspending" his campaign.

"Suspending." Interesting, term that. I guess that means he is hanging on to his delegates. And in the unlikely event there is a brokered convention (because, say, McCain shoots himself in the foot-in-the-mouth too many times and becomes further and undeniably disabled), would Romney try again for the nomination if it were up for grabs? Would he even “flipflop” about getting out of the race? You bet.

He decided to withdraw for the good of his party and his country, he said. And his bank account. And he didn’t want to get his hair mussed.

The Union Leader, New Hampshire’s “McCainstream media,” has praised the decision, saying Romney put his ego aside. Really? I don’t think there is a storage facility that large anywhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Has he sent it to Yucca Mountain, perhaps? And where would Sen. McCain set his ego down if he ever decides to put it aside. Perhaps in his home state of Arizona.

The Grand Canyon is there, after all.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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I don’t have a vested interest in the outcome of the presidential primary contests of either major party, but I do have, perhaps foolishly, a rooting interest in what has become the two-person race for the Democratic nomination. I find myself pulling for Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton, the notorious Mme. Hillarious.

I say "perhaps foolishly" because I don’t want to see either one of them become president and I believe Obama would have the better chance of winning the November election. Clinton, who matches her husband in ruthlessness but lacks his political charm, is the candidate with the better chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Democrats.

Yet I know some Democrats and left-leaning independents who want Clinton for what they see as pragmatic reasons. As someone wrote to me the other day, Obama has limited experience in dealing with the daggers and long knives in Washington. My correspondent believes Clinton would be better able to get things done there. He may be right. And that’s what scares me.

I believe my friend makes the common mistake of equating competence and effectiveness with virtue or progress. He and I disagree a great deal about what in theory government should do. But I don’t know that he would disagree that, in practice, government does more evil than good — even though the good that it does is necessary and, so, arguably, is some of the evil (in a just war, for example).

So it’s possible — maybe — that I could vote in good conscience for a “pro-choice” (in effect, pro-abortion) candidate if that candidate is truly antiwar. Both Clinton and Obama are "pro-choice" and neither is really antiwar. Obama, to be sure opposed the invasion of Iraq, but has voted to continue funding the war and wouldn’t rule out preemptive war against Iran. But John "Boots on the brain" McCain, like the Shrub, will almost certainly destroy far more lives by being pro-war than he will save by being anti-abortion. Especially when you consider that his anti-abortion stand is tepid and equivocal. In short, I remain persuaded that McCain’s next thought on the subject will be his first.

So I think Clinton’s greater ability to be effective inside the beltway is a virtue only if you believe that the things she will accomplish will make our nation better, rather than worse, regardless of how pure or corrupt her motives may be. Some of what she considers good in terms of government programs or policies, others might (and I certainly would) consider bad.

It kind of surprises even me, but I attended a Clinton rally here in Manchester, NH last summer and actually applauded perhaps as many as half a dozen times at things the witch said. I applauded, for example, when she said that she would order the Department of Defense to have on her desk within 60 days of her inauguration a plan for withdrawing our troops from Iraq. I applauded even more when she promised to take better care of our wounded veterans than this administration has done. But when she spoke of deficiencies in the No Child Left Behind Act, mine was, as far as I could tell, the lone voice chanting, “End it, don’t mend it! End it, don’t mend it!”

It seems Clinton and Obama have many goals in common and many of their policies and programs are quite similar and may, in some cases, be virtually identical. If you agree with such policies, you might understandably view Clinton’s experience in dealing with the political establishment in Washington as a plus for the nation as well as for her. But on matters where she is, or both are, wrong (Call them Legion, for they are many) her ability to accomplish those goals would be a negative.

I am not saying Obama has a right view of government, though I think some of the thoughts he has expressed show some insight into and appreciation of our federal system. What I am saying is that I would rather have someone with a right (or at least more right) view of government, even though less effective in advancing it, than someone with a more wrong view of government who would be more effective in getting wrong things enacted.

I had that argument years ago with a friend who supported liberal, "pro-choice" former U.S. Senator John Durkin in a U.S. senate race here in New Hampshire against conservative, pro-life Bob Smith. Durkin was more “competent,” my friend insisted. "But competent to what end?" I asked

I argued this way: Suppose you wanted to go somewhere and you could ride with one of two bus drivers and you knew which one was more competent. He knew the routes and the alternate routes better, was more skilled at safely weaving in and out of traffic, arrived on time more often. But suppose the more competent driver was taking his bus to Nashua, about 18 miles to the south of Manchester and you wanted to go to Concord, the same distance to the north. By my friend’s way of thinking, he would get on the bus with the Nashua-bound driver because he is more competent. Thus my friend would arrive in Nashua, having been very competently transported 18 miles further from his destination.

However calmly and coolly such a decision may be reached, I believe it follows a famous definition of fanaticism: a redoubling of your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

I do believe my friend was a liberal without knowing it or at least without admitting it. He thought he was just being practical. That’s why he would have taken the bus to Nashua when he wanted to go to Concord.

I believe it was Chesterton who said, “The problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.”

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Chances are no one, looking back on the early stages of the current presidential nomination ordeal, will be tempted to write "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive." There was, indeed, a dawn, though dawn, by definition, does not last long. Seems like only yesterday when some Republicans who should have known better were looking to Fred Thompson as the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. Now we have been reduced to watching John McCain recreate the presidential campaign of Robert Dole. It should be a good year for the Democrats.

The original Robert Dole isn’t dead yet, though it’s not certain anyone will be able to tell the difference when he is. But can we have a reincarnation of Bob Dole while Dole is still alive? Can the planet stand two Bob Doles at one time?

Consider the similarities. Bob Dole ran for vice president in 1976 as Gerald Ford’s running mate against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in a campaign to end all insomnia. Back then, Dole complained that all the wars of the 20th Century had been "Democrat wars." McCain has worked with President Bush to ensure that the 21st Century would begin with righteous Republican wars, hatched in a righteous Republican White House. Dole must be pleased.

As the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, Bob Dole promised a bridge to the past and then fell off it. He was, in my judgment, the worst major-party candidate for president in my lifetime. (John Kerry was second.) The man Newt Gingrich once denounced as the "tax collector for the welfare state" tried to don the conservative mantle, but it just didn’t fit. He read the Tenth Amendment as part of his stump speech and managed to give the impression at each stop that he was reading it for the first time. Bob Dole handling constitutional precepts brought to mind Archie Bunker’s warning to his daughter:

"Don’t go puttin’ none o’ them fancy ideas in your mother’s head, little girl, it’s like puttin’ lace on a bowlin’ ball."

Now I suspect McCain has only begun to demonstrate his ineptitude as a campaigner for the presidency. I admit the man is not dumb. But how smart can he be when, at a time when all indications are the economy is the dominant issue again, he announces that economic policy is not his strong suit? What is he going to do, ask Alan Greenspan? Oh, I’m sure he’ll have plenty of economic advisers. And if he’s lucky he might find two of them who agree one day.

Fear not, gentle readers. The world will little note nor long remember either Bob or John McDole. Unless, of course, McCain becomes president and starts World War III — or IV, as the neocons count them. But McCain’s ineptitude as a campaigner makes it unlikely he will be the president to lead us into Armageddon. Hillary Clinton will do that. Or perhaps Obama will. (Barack the bomber?)

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, he will immediately be the sentimental favorite with the general public and even more so with the "mainstream media." There will likely be a seismic shift in his direction. But as we get closer to November, people will have more reservations about his relative inexperience. That will become a real liability if al Queda starts messing in some strategic part of the world and another military crisis looms. Then the electorate may turn to McCain, if he is the Republican nominee, and entrust the near future to his superior knowledge and military experience.

But what has McCain learned from all that experience? Well, he was an officer in the U.S. Navy, so he learned how to command men. He also learned how to take orders, often unquestioningly. How has that experienced served him in the U.S. Senate? Well, McCain has questioned a lot of the pork barrel spending that routinely goes on in Washington. But he has shown a callous disregard for his general orders, the Constitution of the United States. I have in a recent column gone over his cavalier attitude toward the freedom of speech in his championing of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, so I’ll say no more about that. Except to add that the great maverick of the Grand Old Party said Moveon.org should be kicked out of the country for the crime of taking poetic license with the name of one of our generals and calling him "General Betray-us." Oh, yeah. Have I mentioned McCain’s open contempt for the freedom of speech?

So with McCain we would have a hot-tempered dictator with his hand on the nuclear trigger, instead of a cold-blooded witch with her hand, or her husband’s, on the same trigger; or a freshman senator who’s already been talking about invading Pakistan. Nice prospects for peace.

But McCain will bring back fiscal conservatism, some believe — or pretend to believe. Well, I’m kind of an old-fashioned fiscal conservative. I think if you are really going to slow the spending train down in Washington, you have to oppose more than the egregious pork barrel items that get the headlines and capture our attention. You have to be willing to eliminate programs and even departments of government, like the U.S. Department of Education, for example. Remember when the Republicans were going to eliminate that living monument to educational bureaucracy? Really, they were. Crossed their hearts and hoped to die, they were.

Well, they didn’t eliminate it. And they didn’t die, either. Instead they greatly expanded the cost and the reach of that department with things like the NO Child Left Behind Act, which McCain supported along with President Bush and their good friend Ted Kennedy. And again with his good friend, Sen. Kennedy, McCain supports a program for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that will be expensive in both the public and private sectors. And how much will the amnesty he favors for illegal aliens cost U.S. taxpayers at the local, state and federal levels?

Finally, there is the question of McCain’s vaunted judgment — vaunted because Mitt Romney, his principal opponent in his march toward the nomination, and the "McCainstream media" let the senator get away with claiming he was right on Iraq. The "surge" is working and McCain was out there supporting it from the start, long before it had popular support — assuming that it does now. But that is an interesting way of framing the discussion about Iraq, as though it all started with the surge. Hey, were we all born yesterday?

Even the "drive by" media, which encourages limited attention spans and deficit memory disorders, should be able to remember that the congressional authorization for this war came in October, 2002 when it was voted on by both houses of Congress. McCain and the vast majority of his Republican colleagues and the vast majority of the Democrats, including Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Biden, and Dodd voted for it. They, like McCain, swallowed uncritically the administration’s Emperor’s New Clothes argument for war. And McCain has never backed away from it.

Now Senator "Straight Talk" says we should be prepared to maintain a military presence in Iraq for 100 years. That doesn’t say much for his judgment, his experience or his ability to learn from experience. It doesn’t help his reputation for fiscal conservatism. As the president prepares to present to Congress a Fiscal 2009 budget exceeding $3 trillion, this sobering thought should come to mind. It would take an awful lot of "bridges to nowhere" to equal the wasteful spending incurred by the Bush-McCain-Clinton et al. war in Iraq.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Today, January 22, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators will march in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building as part of a day-long protest of the legally protected "right" of abortion created and decreed by said court 35 years ago today.

Another, perhaps smaller, number will demonstrate on the other side of the "abortion rights" controversy, standing in front of the same building, demanding that abortion remain "safe and legal." The irony will be lost on most demonstrators and perhaps even some of the justices inside. So many people, seeking either a change in the "law of the land" or wishing to preserve unaltered one of its provisions, will visibly direct their respective pleas to the judicial, rather than the legislative, branch of our government.

It reminds me of a cartoon I saw many yeas ago, in which a child comes home from school and informs his dumbfounded parents that "Today, we learned how the Supreme Court makes a law." Funny, huh? But the sad truth is that the Supreme Court has the Congress and the legislatures of 50 states straightjacketed in submission to a judicial tyranny that the anti-Federalists feared and Federalists could scarcely imagine at the beginning of our republic.

You may visit Washington, D.C. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York, New York and you will not find the site whereon was held the constitutional convention that made "abortion rights" among the liberties for which "governments are created among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Nor will you find anywhere in the Constitution any mention nor even hint of abortion or a right to same. No, it has been the divination of such a right by the Supreme and lesser courts that has held this nation in a paralysis for 35 years, unable to defend itself against the slaughter of, so far, an estimated 50 million children in the womb and even outside the womb.

This applies to other issues besides abortion. Certainly, anything touching upon the peaceful coexistence of religion and state in the public square has to pass "constitutional muster," according to the Supreme and nearest federal court. Your community wishes to commemorate Christmas with a crèche in front of City Hall? The court will tell you what may and may not be in the display for it to be constitutionally permissible. A moment of silence at the start of the school day? A prayer for the safety of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of a football game? You are in danger of violating Mr. Madison’s carefully constructed "separation of church and state."

That phrase, by the way, appears nowhere in the Constitution and was employed by the Supreme Court in the late 1940′s to emphasize and reinforce as constitutional law what the Constitution never said. It was taken from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of ministers in Danbury, Connecticut concerning a scheme for using the coercive power of the state to raise money for a particular church. That was an example of something the Constitution forbids the federal government from legislating, an "establishment of religion."

The Supreme Curt has not only usurped powers that the Constitution leaves to the other two branches of the federal government or to the States and people respectively, but has subverted the whole purpose of government. The State is supposed to be the servant, not the master of the people. It is not a creative power; it can either conserve or destroy. Even the Constitution does not create nor give to us our rights, but recognizes, affirms and guarantees their protection. Who, then, decides what those rights are? We do. The American people have gratefully received rights "endowed by their Creator" and have written them in plain English into our Constitution. We did not hide them in "penumbras" and "emanations" to be discovered by jurists of later generations. We put our cards on the table.

We created government to be a backstop to help reaffirm and, when necessary, reinforce values upheld by other, more fundamental institutions — the family, the church, private charitable organizations. We grant to the State the power to provide for the care and nurture of children when and where the family unit has broken down. We expect the State to apprehend and punish those who commit crimes against society and against their neighbors when the moral power of religion has proved insufficient to deter them. We expect the State will step forth with a temporary and needed "decent provision for the poor" when private agencies are unavailable or unable to provide the same. We pay for public schools because most people are too busy making a living to educate their own children. But "We the People" never imagined a society in which a parent would be arrested and charged with criminal trespass for going to his child’s school and refusing to leave until he saw what she was being taught in the name of "sex education." Yet that has happened and may happen again.

Nor did we expect that the various rights of privacy that "We the People" had written into the Constitution — the right not to have soldiers quartered in our homes in times of peace, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure — would one day provide the justices of the high court the alchemy needed to turn those specific guarantees into a blank page headed "Rights of Privacy," for which the justices themselves would write the content.

Thus we have the "fundamental constitutional right" that the Constitution nowhere mentions — the "right" to abort or to "terminate a pregnancy" or exercise "reproductive rights." The State authorizes killing in other circumstances — in war, for example, or with the death penalty for serious crimes. The law recognizes the right of an individual to use deadly force if necessary to defend his own or another’s endangered life or limb. But with the single exception of abortion, the law nowhere recognizes the "right" of an individual to terminate the life of another human being, strictly as a matter of personal "choice."

Yet the Supreme Court has created that right, not only as a provision of federal law and of the federal Constitution, but has imposed it on all 50 states and territories of the United States.

If this is not usurpation, we are at a loss to say what usurpation means — though I suppose the court could create a new definition. And to the Founders, usurpation meant tyranny. If you doubt it, read the Federalist Papers.

Now, if you will forgive the nearly sacrilegious nature of the comparison, abortion has become a subject like the Christmas crèche or the prayers (or suggestion of prayer) in school or the Ten Commandments in schoolhouse or courthouse. We may not even think about doing anything the court would not approve. Banning late-term abortions, requiring minors to seek parental consent or at least provide parental notification, requiring "informed consent" or anything else touching upon the sacred ground of abortion "rights" must pass "constitutional muster." Meanwhile, the court gives a pass to things like the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that clearly abridges the freedom of speech, which the Constitution says the Congress may not abridge.

The battle is not just, nor even primarily, about abortion. It is about getting our Constitution back from the thieves and tyrants of the federal judiciary.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The other day I got an e-mail from someone named Tagg Romney. I had no idea what a Tagg Romney is, but I assume it is someone related to the Romney who is running for president of the United States, the one called Mitt. Where do they get these names?

Yes, Tagg is a son of Mitt. One of the several sons of Mitt who have gone forth to multiply and fill the earth, starting with all the Romney mansions in New England, one of which is a summer home in Wolfeboro, NH, where most people didn’t know they were living in the vicinity of a possible "summer White House." That is, if Mitt can do nationally what he did in the Massachusetts gubernatorial race in 2002 and snatch victory from the jaws of victory, instead of turning it into defeat as he did in the U.S. Senate race there in 1994.

Then, you may recall, he had the mighty Ted Kennedy on the ropes but let him get away. Well, Mitt is nothing if not nice and it’s not nice to hit an old man. So he didn’t. He stood back and let Ted back into the center of the ring, where he pummeled Mitt with the Mittster’s lack of knowledge of what was what and how you get thing done in the U.S. Senate, the way an old pro like Ted with a name like Kennedy can. Ted has been saying that since 1962, when, with brother Jack in the White House and brother Bobby as attorney general, Ted’s campaign theme was, "Kennedys do more for Massachusetts." Yes, by Gawd, ask, Massachusetts — go ahead and AHSK — what your country can do for you!

Anyway, most residents of Wolfeboro were not even aware they had a future president in their midst until Romney began visiting and entertaining there when he began "exploring" a run for president. "Exploring," by the way, covereth a multitude of sins. My fine Irish father, God bless him, was quite an explorer. He would explore the neighborhood taverns, taking polls on whether or not he should have another drink. There being no objections, the "ayes" invariably would have it.

Anyhow, it is widely believed that, but for Mitt’s presidential campaign, President Sarkozy of France would have been seen more frequently in Wolfeboro than summer resident and taxpayer Mitt Romney.

And it took a Romney victory in Michigan to inspire an e-mail from a boy named Tagg. (I have no idea what his age is, but I can hardly believe a grown man would allow himself to be called "Tagg.") Apparently, Tagg doesn’t do Wyoming caucuses. On primary eve in New Hampshire, even Concord attorney Tom Rath, who has seen more New Hampshire primaries than the late, great Old Man of the Mountain, was spinning Wyoming as a big win for Romney. That was crucial to minimize his impending defeat in New Hampshire, the neighboring state that knows Sarkozy, but does not vote for Romney.

I can’t wait to see from whom I will get an e-mail when Mitt wins another primary or caucus. I am not acquainted with the governor’s warm and wonderful family. Is there a Hide-and-Seek Romney? A Two-Hand Touch Romney? A Spin-the-Bottle Romney? I’ll bet there’s even a Charades Romney. And a Masquerade Romney. Oh, I forgot. That’s the former governor and would-be president himself.

Because at least one of the Romneys we have been seeing in political campaigns in Massachusetts has got to be in a masquerade. You remember the Romney that was endorsed by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League? The one who told the Massachusetts "gay rights" crowd that he would be better for them and their cause then Sen. Kennedy had been or would be? Well, to out-pander Ted Kennedy, you have to go to great lengths and Romney will go to almost any length. This, after all, is the man who told his campaign staff to "Make all the promises you have to."

So now Mitt is masquerading as a conservative. He wants the NRA to know he’s their man. Likewise, the national Right to Life Committee, which endorsed Fred Thompson, because hey, they’re for the Right to Life, not the way to pick a winner. So NARAL feels betrayed? Well, that outfit has already outlived its usefulness. Who needs NARAL in a Republican presidential primary? Let them have Rudy.

Let’s see now, Romney was a) "for" or b) "against" the Bush tax cuts? The answer to a question like that is usually, c) "both" or sometimes d) "all of the above." But Romney has had his "epiphany" and is now against abortion and for the right to life. Except those lives that get in the way of righteous Republican bombs falling on Baghdad and other trouble spots around the world. "Trouble spots" are made less troublesome, we are encouraged to believe, by the expenditure of American bombs and bullets, purchased with your tax dollars by the U.S. Congress and blessed by our military chaplains.

Mitt looks good, though, the candidate from Central Casting. He is more Kennedyesque than Kennedy, more handsome even than John Edwards and without the Huey Long neo-Marxism that flows like mint julep through the silver-tongued oratory of the smooth-talking and cagey Carolinian. And Romney knows how to sing from the Republican hymnal: sacred songs about small government, less spending (except on that poor, half-starved military machine), encouraging enterprise and all that. Yes, we may have all that and guaranteed (even mandated) health insurance, too. As the son of a millionaire, Mitt may have been born on third base, but he’s got all the bases covered.

The man speaks well, too. He waxes eloquent and with the proper inflection of indignation when talking about wasteful government spending on redundant programs. Quick, how many economic development programs does the federal government run? Mitt will tell you — 342. The governor is a fair-minded man and will allow that some of them may even work. The federal government has more than 40 job-training programs. Mitt would trim that to a more manageable five or six. But here’s the killer — the "feds" have 13 programs to reduce teenage pregnancy. We might find one or two that actually work and just fund those, suggests the magnanimous Mitt.

As Archie Bunker used to say when one of Edith’s stories ran too long, "Help me, Lord!" This is what conservatism has become in our time. Reducing the number of federal programs on teenage pregnancy to one or two. The Founders would be amazed to find any programs at all on teenage pregnancy. People married young in the early days of the republic and teenage pregnancy was the norm. Extramarital sex was not. But you can’t come out against extramarital sex in these enlightened times. Not even a righteous Mormon Republican who takes the name of the Lord in a political speech would dare do that.

So we have "programs" to deal with problems that are none of the federal government’s business and which are guaranteed not to tackle head-on whatever problems they are not solving. The great columnist Joe Sobran once said that conservatism in the days after Bill Clinton announced the end of "big government" had degenerated into the promise of "a little less Socialism in seven years." Right.

And the next Republican administration will likely enact the Dennis Kucinich platform of the cradle-to-grave welfare state with a single-payer universal healthcare system, universal pre-school, universal Phd’s, and a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all universal universe, dedicated to the principle of diversity. There will be, as a sop to social and religious conservatives, a new cabinet-level Department of Teenage Chastity, which will subsidize condoms, birth control pills and abortifacients. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education will keep teaching kids there are no simple answers, like "Just Say No!"

In a few more campaign cycles, we will no longer need the circus. We have the presidential campaigns and a government that is to late-night comedians "the gift that keeps on giving."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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New Hampshire voters are an inscrutable lot. In northern New England, we admire the virtues of the strong silent type, like Calvin Coolidge, born in Vermont and sworn in there as the 30th President of the United States. Coolidge was called "Silent Cal" and he oft expressed an affinity for keeping his thoughts to himself. "I have noticed that nothing that I never said ever did me any harm," he said. And that holds true in New Hampshire as well. The famous rock profile, the Old Man of the Mountain, sat atop Cannon Mountain for centuries without once expressing an opinion about anything.

So what were New Hampshire Republicans and independents who voted in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary saying in voting for John McCain? Were they saying they are ignorant of McCain’s profound indifference at best, or his contempt at worst, for the First Amendment? Or were they saying they share that indifference or contempt?

I would guess probably not the latter. New Hampshire voters, like those in the rest of the nation, have an uneasy feeling about the influence of money on the political process. But if you put the Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, with its undeniable abridgements of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, on the ballot in a referendum and had a reasonable campaign about it, it would probably lose. No doubt a lot of money would be spent to defeat it, but a lot would be spent in support of it as well. And I believe it would lose.

Yet it is the most well-known legislative achievement of U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who is, after all a legislator and not Secretary of State or Secretary of the Defense. People may like his approach to foreign policy or national defense, but his primary job over the past quarter century has been to make laws for the United States. And if "McCain-Feingold" is his legislative showpiece, you may wonder what the losers were like.

For those who may have forgotten the import of McCain-Feingold, it imposed restrictions on political spending that were supposed to reduce the corrupting influence of money on political campaigns. It placed limits on "soft" money that parties could contribute to individual candidates, along with restrictions on spending by unions and corporations, though "corporations" is a very broad term.

A political action committee is a corporation, usually registered as such with the state in which it operates. The Wisconsin Right to Life Committee, Inc. is such a corporation. In the fall of 2006, Wisconsin Right to Life sought to run political advertisements calling on the state’s two U.S. senators, Herb Kohl and Russell Feingold, to oppose filibusters and other procedural delays of votes on President Bush’s judicial nominees. The ads were ruled a violation of the McCain-Feingold law by the Federal Elections Commission because it mentioned both senators by name within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election in which one of them (Feingold) was a candidate for election.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the law, which many denounced as an incumbent protection act, would so soon be applied to specifically protect one of the bill’s sponsors, who was a candidate for reelection in ’06. It is also worth noting that the application of the law in this manner gives the lie to the argument commonly made in defense of campaign finance reform, that "money is not speech." Two points need to be made clear concerning that bogus argument.

First of all, the argument itself is misleading. Money is not privacy, either. But if, in violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the state were to seize your money without a warrant, it would still be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And when the government prohibits you from spending your money to broadcast your message, that is a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech."

Secondly, the provision that prohibits mention of a candidate’s name is a control over the content, not the cost, of the ad. I am not privy to the rates and conditions placed on commercials run on Wisconsin television stations, but I would hazard a guess that a 30-second or 60-second issue ad would cost the same, whether or not it mentions a candidate’s name. By prohibiting such mention, the law certainly controls the content of speech in a way that has nothing to do with obscenity, incitement to riot, slander or falsely crying "Fire!" in a theater. Anyone see a constitutional red flag here?

But when Wisconsin Right to Life challenged the FEC ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. John McCain did not say, "Wait a minute! This kind of prohibition is not at all what we meant when we wrote and passed McCain-Feingold." On the contrary, he filed an amicus curiae argument in support of the FEC position.

And the Supreme Court, in a hair-splitting, hand-wringing decision issued last year, said the ads were (or would have been) legal because all things considered, they really weren’t intended to influence the outcome of the election campaign in which Feingold was a candidate. Oh. So now it’s legal for us to exercise the freedom of speech over the commercial airwaves as long as we are not trying to influence the outcome of an election. Yet it is precisely for such a purpose, among others, that the right to exercise the freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Yet McCain apparently believes that in campaign finance reform there is a higher law than the Constitution — there is the McCain standard of purity.

"Obviously, from what we’ve been seeing lately, we didn’t complete the job," McCain said about campaign financing when interviewed on radio by Don Imus in the spring of 2006. "But I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”

McCain is entitled to his own personal "rathers," but as a United States Senator his oath of office requires him to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not his righteous concept of cleanliness. His attitude toward the First Amendment is nothing if not arrogant. And more arrogance in disregard of the requirements written into the Bill of Rights is not what we need in the White House at any time, but especially after eight years of the Bush-Cheney regime. We don’t need John McCain in the Oval Office, attempting to "complete the job" of emasculating the First Amendment

No doubt some New Hampshire voters who chose McCain support the controversial law that bears his name. Many others did so either having forgotten or having never informed themselves about McCain-Feingold. Others knew of it, but preferred McCain for other reasons. They are not "single-issue voters."

But the Constitution of the United States is not a "single issue." It should not be an issue at all. It is the "supreme law of the land," higher even than Sen. McCain’s exalted sense of honor or his standard of cleanliness. To overlook that is to overlook quite a lot. As some wag said, "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

Other than that, New Hampshire, how do you like the Bill of Rights?

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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In her 2004 book Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, stubbornly irreverent New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recalled in her introduction that "Poppy" Bush, (Bush ’41) was rather uncomfortable with Ms. Dowd in her role during the first Bush administration as the Times’ White House correspondent.

"Poppy Bush had been expecting a traditional pin-striped Times correspondent, one with a name like Chatsworth Farnsworth III, who would scribble about ’41 leading the Atlantic alliance," Dowd observed. Not only the New York Times, but the whole media establishment has too many aspiring Chatsworth Farnsworths, with or without Roman numerals, who are all too eager to discover the next world leader of grand ambition and global "vision." We would be better served if they would just stand back and report and comment on how the American people choose the president of the United States. Where have you gone, Theodore H. White?

The Anything But Candid (ABC) television network and cable channel Fox News this week announced plans to limit the number of candidates participating in this weekend’s televised debates — ABC’s on Saturday night and the Fox News event on Sunday night. This is, for the benefit of that portion of the rest of the civilized world that may not have been paying attention, the weekend immediately preceding next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary elections. ABC had a number of criteria for winnowing the field based on standing in the polls, money raised and how they fared in the Iowa caucuses. Fox had already made its decision for its Republican debate and U.S. Reps. Ron Paul of Texas and Duncan Hunter of California didn’t make the cut.

That means the Fox debate will include the Big Three — Romney, McCain, Giuliani — whom former candidate Tommy Thompson called by one name: "Rudy McRomney." And Gov. Huckabee will be both seen and heard by the national TV audience, unless he has lost another 100 pounds by then and has become invisible. And former Tennessee Senator and Law and Order star Fred Thomson will be included and will no doubt lead a nationwide TV audience to the dramatic discovery of the missing smoking gun, or "mushroom-shaped cloud" that justified the war in Iraq.

Duncan Hunter won’t get to talk about his fence to keep the illegal immigrants out. And without Ron Paul, there won’t be single voice in the Republican debate raised against our continued participation in the great neo-nuthouse Bush War II in Iraq that Paul has always opposed, still opposes and would end soon after he enters the White House. At that time, Fox News may fall on its propagandistic sword and stop covering the White House, though there may be occasional mention of rumors of an alleged White House somewhere in Washington, DC. Perhaps there will even be rumors of a Washington, D.C. Who needs a real president, White House or capital, anyway? Who needs a real debate? Fox News creates its own reality.

Indeed, that is what many, if not most, of the columnists, commentators and alleged reporters in Chatsworth Nation wish to do. They like to create our reality for us. They will tell us who the candidates and what the issues are, thank you. A caller on a talk show here in New Hampshire made the point that it was not so much an issue of who gets left out of the debates, but what is being left out. Neither Paul’s argument against the war in Iraq nor his call for abolition of the Federal Reserve will be heard by the Fox News audience. Nor will Dennis Kucinich’s plan for universal health care be heard on ABC. The marketplace of ideas that should be part of a presidential debate has been shrunk by the imperial edict of the Chatsworth Caesars of the Fourth Estate.

Listening to that very insightful argument, I didn’t think it had much impact on the two professors who were guests on the program, one from the University of New Hampshire, the other from Harvard. Both offered tepid defenses of the ABC’s and Fox’s fiats. Neither, I suspect, gives a cat’s keyster or a rat’s rear end about "the marketplace of ideas." Neither, I am certain, do the two major political parties. And neither does the "mainstream media" which is so much and so often in bed with the political establishment that they are no doubt breaking laws against incest and fornication in every state in the union.

Is it a coincidence that the establishment, kennel-fed media want to keep out pretty much the same people that the political establishment wants to keep out — the Pauls and the Kuciniches and the Hunters, the bulls in a political china shop, who aren’t afraid of breaking a few political icons? That gives the "mainstream media" or Nuthouse News, Inc., more time to dote on the stars and amplify their messages for them. We hear, for example, that voters in New Hampshire or Iowa, are being asked to compare Hillary Clinton’s "experience" versus Barack Obama’s promise of change. What we don’t hear much of is the substance, or lack of it, in the change Obama promises. And we seldom hear the journalistic gatekeepers of the political conversation challenge Clinton’s claim of experience. The cartoonists do a better job — especially the one who depicted Sen. Clinton in an operating room advising a patient not to worry: "I’m not a surgeon, but I was married to one for eight years."

I recently heard one of the talking heads on the radio refer offhandedly to Sen. Clinton’s "sensible foreign policy." Really? On what, I wonder, is that glib assumption based? Her cop-out, pass the buck vote in October of 2002 to authorize the Great Decider to unilaterally decide whether or not he would take this nation to war in Iraq — when it was all too obvious he would? Someone should have brought Senator Clinton and each of her colleagues who voted as she did a bowl of water so each could ritually wash his or her hands in the tradition of Pontius Pilate.

That is what the "mudstream" media is inclined to call a "sensible foreign policy." Go along to get along. Follow the conventional wisdom, defined so well by Joe Sobran as, "what everybody thinks everybody else thinks." People like Paul or Kucinich, who opposed our war of aggression in Iraq from the beginning and have consistently opposed the funding of it, are usually labeled, "controversial" at best and "extremist" and "isolationist" at worst.

Last year, PBS correspondent Bill Moyers produced a documentary called Buying the War, showing how the major news media swallowed the lies, half-truths and deceptions that somehow convinced most of the nation (if the polls were to be believed) that Iraq was a serious threat to the United States. Did the establishment media "buy" the war? Or was the media "bought" by the war’s proponents?

At the end of last week, Fergus Cullen, chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican State Committee, was still trying to convince Fox News, with whom the state GOP is co-sponsor of the debate, to relent and let the banned candidates participate. My suggestion to Mr. Cullen was that he announce the New Hampshire Republican Party has withdrawn its sponsorship, leaving Fox to either go it alone or find another sponsor. For the sake of candor, I recommend that Fox sponsor this debate as a joint venture with the American Kennel Club. That, or something like that, is where I would assume the political establishment finds the accommodating Chatsworth Farnsworths of the Fourth Estate.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The world has come a long way since Woodrow Wilson offered a 14-point plan for world peace. (It was not entirely successful.) Today the junior senator from Illinois has a 35-point plan to "revolutionize" education. Clearly, point inflation has gotten out of hand.

Barack Obama’s $18 billion education plan, recently unveiled in Manchester, NH includes a "Zero to Five" early education program and a quadrupling of the Early Head Start program. Early Head Start is a lot like Head Start, only it starts earlier, giving little toddlers a greater appreciation of redundancy in federal programs.

Obama’s plan would also provide funding for expanding the school day or the school year. It includes a base salary for "well prepared and successful teachers" with increased pay for those who demonstrate additional skills and higher levels of performance. But Obama, compassionate soul that he is, would not impose pay raises on teachers without their consent.

"He said the higher pay would have to be designed with the agreement of teacher unions," said one news account. Well, of course. Congress designs its own pay raises with the agreement of the Congress, so why shouldn’t teachers have the same opportunity? Surely, teachers’ unions can’t be left out of the planning of an education program for the entire nation. Parents and taxpayers, sure, but not the teachers’ unions.

When education programs are funded from the federal treasury, taxing and spending decisions are taken away from citizens and their local school boards and settled in Washington, D.C. And our "leaders" in Washington remain convinced that money grows on trees, even if those trees are now in China. While it may be true that for some of these programs, state or local officials may have the option of refusing the largesse, who wants to turn down "free" money, once it has already been taken from the taxpayers (or borrowed from China and other creditors) by a higher authority?

"As president, I will put the full resources of the federal government behind this plan," he said. Never mind the hyperbole employed in committing "the full resources of the federal government" to but one of that government’s myriad functions. But note the hubris implicit in the notion that those resources are at the disposal of the president, to implement whatever plan or plans he may have in mind. Surely, Sen. Obama expects his education plan to be designed with the approval of the Congress, which he may consider almost as important as the teachers’ unions.

Obama, sad to say, is not alone in wanting to expand the reach of the federal government in education. Gov. Richardson has an education plan. Rep. Kucinich has an education plan. Sen. Clinton wants to "provide universal basic education for all children throughout the world." This is "mission creep" on steroids. The United States, already the world’s policemen, must be its school district as well.

And the Republicans, after 20 years of promising to abolish the federal Department of Education, dropped that plank from the party’s platform in 2000, when George W. Bush came along with his "No Child Left Behind" plan. The programs multiply but somehow the benefits are always to be found in the next multi-point plan to reform or "revolutionize" education.

That, in turn, is a reflection of the way we look at politics. The typical media portrayal of a presidential campaign is of voters shopping among various agendas and priorities offered by vendors (candidates) with a dazzling array of them. But the agenda of the federal government is set out in the Constitution of the United States, where education is a "priority" nowhere mentioned.

That document, held in minimum high regard by most who are sworn to uphold it, would leave the people of New Hampshire and the other states to be arbiters of their own education policies and programs. It does not authorize the federal government to take from us with one hand dollars for education it will give back with the other, minus the transfer fee. It provides neither the president nor the Congress the authority to impose anything resembling a 35-point plan to direct our steps on everything from pre-school to Early Head Start to teacher pay.

Earlier this year I asked presidential candidate Ron Paul what he thought the next president should do to improve education in America.

"Get out of the way!" was his clear and sensible reply. Such concise wisdom should be rewarded at the polls.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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For some Republicans, here in New Hampshire and elsewhere in the land, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is nothing less than the new Saint George, who will save our fair land by slaying the dragon named Hillary. Republicans who doubt it must not be reading their mail.

A recent pamphlet from the Giuliani campaign mentions the dreaded Hillary by name seven times and includes two photos of her. Two of the six panels are devoted to her exclusively. Perhaps we should cancel the New Hampshire primary now. Mayor Giuliani has already chosen the nominees of both parties.

"Rudy Giuliani is the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2008," the slick mailer proclaims. Where, in Hoboken? Uncle Rudolph was going to defeat Hillary when she invaded New York and ran for the Senate in 2000. Some skeptics still believe it was his deteriorating poll numbers more than his health problems that convinced His Honor to withdraw from that race. Surely, he was healthy enough by 2006 to oppose Clinton in her run for reelection. By that time Giuliani, his political stock resurrected by the events of 9-11, was busy running for president. Too bad. Had he slain the dragon lady in ’06, a grateful GOP might have already handed him the presidential nomination for 2008. As it is, the "Only Rudy can beat Hillary" theme remains an untested theory.

Giuliani is on more solid ground when talking about the 23 tax cuts during his eight years as mayor, but even there the road is a little slippery. To get to 23, he counts some tax cuts passed over his strenuous opposition. "The largest and most economically potent tax cut of the Giuliani era," noted Ed McMahon of the Manhattan Institute, "was the elimination of a 12.5 % income tax surcharge — pushed by then-Council Speaker Peter Vallone over strong mayoral opposition." When the City Council reversed a partial repeal of another surtax after only a year, the mayor’s protest was "uncharacteristically muted," McMahon observed in an August 6 op ed piece in the New York Daily News. The "mute" button was off, however, when Giuliani loudly and vigorously opposed the Legislature’s repeal of the city commuter tax.

As president, “I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending,” Giuliani promises. You may look and listen in vain, however, for a federal program he would cut, let alone eliminate. Giuliani’s alleged fiscal conservatism is hard to reconcile with his plan as mayor to use taxpayers’ money to finance two new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets. Nor was it reflected in the $2.8 billion deficit in the final budget he presented in 2001, before the city was rocked by the 9-11 attacks. That’s half a billion larger than the deficit he inherited from his predecessor, David Dinkins.

Giuliani wants to both cut taxes and continue our trillion-dollar (thus far) war in Iraq until we achieve victory–whatever and whenever that might be. If the budget-busting, record-setting deficits of the Bush era have resulted in a weakened dollar and a soaring national debt, just wait. Rudy’s "strong fiscal leadership" will likely set new records for borrowed money and spur a bull market in red ink.

Many conservatives, meanwhile, appear to accept at face value Giuliani’s pledge that as president he will nominate "strict constructionists" like Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts to the Supreme Court. That assumes that Giuliani, a) means what he says in that regard and b) will know a judicial conservative if he sees one. This is the same Giuliani who, as mayor of New York, joined in the suit to make gun manufacturers liable for deaths and injuries resulting from careless or criminal misuse of their products. That’s about as conservative as a suit against auto manufacturers might be over damages caused by reckless drivers.

It was Giuliani who sued — and lost — in New York courts to have the Legislature’s repeal of the aforementioned commuter tax overturned. When a California court overruled a referendum denying a number of state benefits to illegal aliens, Giuliani praised the decision, saying he hoped it would mark "the end of this most recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment." No, Rudy doesn’t want activist judges legislating from the bench. Not while he’s running for president, anyway.

So is Rudy Giuliani the new Saint George, the dragon slayer? Or is he a Wrong-way Corrigan for conservatives? As Ronald Reagan might have said, "Mayor, I knew Saint George. Saint George was a friend of mine. And Mayor Giuliani, you’re no Saint George."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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Barry Bonds has been indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over his testimony to a grand jury investigating steroid use in Major League Baseball. One of his friends, meanwhile, remains in jail a year after he refused to testify against baseball’s home run king. What’s wrong with this picture?

No, I’m not trying to encourage sympathy for Bonds, whose alleged steroid abuse may have enhanced, but has otherwise overshadowed his remarkable on-field achievements. But Major League Baseball has its own rules about substance use and abuse and has the means — fines, suspension, banishment from the game — of enforcing them. The fact that this is the subject of a federal investigation might lead us to think, if we didn’t know better, that these must be slow days in lawbreaking. Otherwise, why would the U.S. Department of Justice be wasting the valuable time of its (our, really) investigators, the courts, a federal grand jury and the tax dollars of American citizens by trying to save the game of baseball from steroids?

Chances are, there aren’t many conservatives asking this question. For all their talk about wanting to limit the role of government, to make it smaller and less burdensome, political conservatives can be counted on, time and again, to support policies and programs that give the federal government ever larger, more expensive and steadily growing control over the lives of our citizens. Whether it is backing a war of (at best) dubious justification, or expanding the power of the Surveillance State with legislation like the Patriot Act, or "standing with the president" when he unilaterally suspends habeas corpus, American conservatives may reliably be found in the "Yea and Amen" corner of a bigger, more intrusive government.

Indeed, the whole area of law enforcement is one in which the typical conservative can’t grow the government fast enough. Under our federal Constitution, criminal law is, with a few exceptions, a matter left to the states. When Congress, in the early days of the Republic, enacted a federal statute making seditious libel a federal crime, James Madison called the Sedition Act "a monster that must forever disgrace its parents." The future president spelled out his objections to the act as the anonymous author of the Virginia Resolutions, which were adopted by the legislature of that commonwealth. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, was the unnamed author of a similar statement, adopted with minor amendment by the Kentucky legislature.

The Sedition Act was designed and used by the Federalists then in power to punish with prison sentences their political opponents and the opposition press. Republican Congressman Matthew Lyons of Vermont won reelection from his jail cell after being convicted under the new law for voicing his anti-Federalist convictions. Editors followed him to jail and newspapers were shut down. All of this occurred within the first ten years of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

But the thrust of the arguments set forth by Messrs. Madison and Jefferson was not that the Sedition Act violated the "freedom of speech and of the press" guaranteed by the First Amendment. It was, rather, that the Act ignored the fundamental principal summed up in the Tenth: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The Constitution, Jefferson noted, did not grant the federal government any power to punish sedition. It delegated to the Congress "a power to punish treason, counterfeiting the currencies and the current coin of the United States, piracies, felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations, and no other crimes whatsoever," he wrote.

Yet Congress in our time has been far more inventive. With various versions and updates of The Omnibus Crime Act, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, The Narcotics Control Act, The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act and other multitudinous and redundant acts of pretended crime-fighting, the tough-on-crime, law-and-order conservatives have joined with their liberal, "big government" brethren in multiplying the number of federal crimes. A task force of the American Bar Association concluded a decade ago that they virtually defied quantification.

"So large is the present body of federal criminal law that there is no conveniently accessible complete list of federal crimes," the task force found. Writing in Reason magazine in April of 2004, William Anderson and Candace E. Jackson reported:

"In just three years in the mid-1990′s, Congress passed criminal statutes dealing with anti-abortion violence, carjacking, failure to pay child support, animal rights terrorism, domestic violence, telemarketing fraud, computer hacking and art theft and many others already covered by state law." In the same article, they noted: "Federal law criminalizes nearly all robberies and schemes to defraud, many firearms offenses, all loan sharking, most illegal gambling operations, most briberies, every drug deal and many more crimes already addressed by state laws."

And that doesn’t even mention all the reams of environmental laws of the past 40 years, including the Endangered Species Act that empowers federal officials to harass and arrest landowners for the crime of disturbing the habitat of a kangaroo rat. The new rights of rodents and snail darters receive a greater protection by our government today than the constitutionally defined liberties of that threatened and endangered species that elects the members of Congress and pays their salaries.

Perhaps nowhere has Congress been more prolific in crime making than in the effort to control drug use. It is worth recalling that when the prohibition of alcohol was enacted, it was generally understood that it was necessary to amend the Constitution to provide an authority that, until then, had simply not been delegated to the federal government. But for the various laws making drugs contraband, no such amendment was enacted or even pursued. Congress simply arrogated to itself the power to prescribe penalties for selling, possessing or ingesting certain kinds of drugs.

And so we have the War on Drugs, first declared as such by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and funded to increasingly extravagant degrees by Republicans and Democrats in Congress ever since. The crusade has been spectacularly unsuccessful in battling the scourge of drugs in our cities and towns, but marvelously efficient in raiding the public treasury. At the end of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the United States was spending a mere $66 million in the battle against illegal drugs. Four years later, at the end of Nixon’s first term, the War on Drugs cost $796 million. By 2000, President Clinton and a Republican Congress had approved $19.2 billion for the drug war.

And what are we getting for all that money? Illegal drugs appear to be as plentiful as they ever were. Business remains highly profitable for the drug dealers and for what has come to be known as the "prison-industrial complex." As more and more prisons are built, young Americans, predominantly young black males, are filling them to overflowing. According to Orange County, California Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, author of "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can do About it," the United States in 1998 had a higher per capita rate of incarceration than any country but Russia. Even Communist China imprisons fewer of its citizens than we do here in the "land of the free."

Perhaps one day soon, Barry Bonds will join America’s growing prison population. And while Thomas Jefferson remains beyond the reach of federal authorities, his home on earth is not. Jefferson cultivated opium poppies at Monticello and poppies were still being grown at that historic site when DEA agents arrived one day twenty years ago and ordered the crop destroyed. Then they confiscated the poppy seeds being sold at the gift shop.

Advocates of the War on Drugs must find it reassuring to know that the same federal authority now saving baseball from steroids has already made Monticello safe from poppy seeds. Jefferson warned us about government like this. So did Madison. The author of the Virginia Resolutions warned against the effort to "consolidate the states by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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SURPRI-ISE! The government has convinced a red white and true blue, no doubt patriotic, all-American jury that former “dirty bomber” Jos Padilla had been conspiring, or at least aspiring to conspire, with those devils, the al-Qaeda, to wage a war of terror against America the Beautiful, Our Country ‘Tis of Thee from Sea to Shining Sea, while the storm clouds gather, so help us, George!

According to all the news reports, the evidence the government produced consisted primarily of Padilla’s fingerprints all over an application form from someone seeking admission to an al-Qaeda training camp. Anyone smell a rat here?

They have application forms for that? In what language(s)? Do they send them through the U.S. mail? Heck, why don’t they just take out ads in the “Help Wanted” section of our major metropolitan newspapers? (“I got my job through the New York Times.” Muhammad Ossama Jihadist)

I can only imagine what an al-Qaeda application form is like: “My main interest is: (Check as many as apply)

• Hijacking
• Beheading
• Car bombing
• Bus bombing
• Arson
• Torture
• Propaganda
• Other (Please specify)

“Please list any specialized training you may have received.”

Do they contact the applicant’s high school or college and request a transcript? What about references? At least three, perhaps? I would think they’d want to hear from the applicant’s chemistry teacher. Does al-Qaeda go to job fairs and set up recruiting posters? “Uncle Osama wants YOU!”

Sorry, but this appears to me to be a Washington bureaucrat’s idea of how al-Qaeda must operate — someone who probably thinks al-Qaeda has a civil service department (the death benefits must add up considerably), not to mention an affirmative action program. Does the EEOC know about these applications?

Perhaps some of these questions may come up on appeal. What’s important now is that the Bush regime, perpetrators of the great Bush War II (or world War IV in the “neocon” lexicon) is off the hook. At least in the Padilla case, the regime can no longer be charged with violating human rights (Human Who?) by imprisoning someone indefinitely, without charges, without trial, without legal counsel (’cause who needs counsel when you’re not charged with anything, right?) without anything remotely resembling due process of law since the days of Magna Carta.

Because when it comes to the guarantees enshrined in the Bill of Rights, our fat-between-the-ears Republican friends, especially those sham “conservatives” of the neo-nuthouse persuasion, may be counted on to not give a damn AT ALL! There are at least four kinds of respect today’s politicos and their Dr. Strangelove theoreticians among the nuthouse “conservatives” have for the Constitution of the United States of America: zero, zilch, nada and none — five, if you count “not a damn bit!”

Meanwhile, our borders remain unsecured, our hapless government officials would be the last to know who’s entering the country, legally or otherwise, and the know-all, tell-all bureaucrats in our Disneyland on the Potomac are sending agricultural subsidies to “farmers” who have been dead for years. And Michael “ET” Chertoff (from WHAT planet?) of the Department of Bushland Security (“Bushland, Bushland ber alles!”) may soon be nominated by His Imperial Majesty to be the next attorney general of the United States.

Help us, Lord!

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The mainstream media, which, as we all know, is totally dedicated to bringing down Our Maximum Leader, George CG (Commander Guy) Bush, generally called it a "significant victory" for the Bush administration. A red, white and blue jury, not wanting to give ground to the terrorists in the Bush World War to "rid the word of evildoers," returned a guilty verdict in the case of Jos Padilla and two other alleged conspirators. The trio was accused of attempting to join the al-Qaeda network in its terrorist campaign. May God deliver the United States of America from any further "victories" over the Constitution of the United States and the due process of law.

It is remarkable that any portion of the public is willing to swallow this hogwash. The Bush regime, under the supreme command of our born-again Benito, seized Padilla, an American citizen, at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in May of 2002 and initially said it was holding him as a "material witness." Then he became an "unlawful enemy combatant." The story put out was that he and others were conspiring to detonate a "dirty bomb" in one of our major U.S. cities, though I don’t believe we were ever told which one.

For more than three years, Padilla was held in solitary confinement in a military prison, with no charge filed against him. The Bush administration claimed it could hold him that way indefinitely, meaning forever, as a prisoner in the war on terror. He was denied the benefit of counsel. He was allowed no communication with the world outside his prison cell. We the people were told we had neither need nor right to know what was happening to him at the hands of our government. He was reportedly subject to sleep deprivation and other means of psychological torture. As the case moved through the judicial system at a glacial pace and the Supreme Court finally appeared on the verge of requiring the government to either charge the prisoner or turn him loose, the prosecutors came up with a confession from Padilla and brought the case to court.

Nearly two years later, the case came to trial and Padilla and his alleged co-conspirators were found guilty. According to the New York Times, the most substantial evidence against Padilla was an application form, with his fingerprints on it, for training at an al-Qaeda camp in the year 2000. I’m not sure what law that broke, since, whatever al-Qaeda may have declared about the United States by then, the United States was not at war with al-Qaeda in 2000. To the best of my knowledge, the Congress of the United States still has not formally declared war against al-Qaeda or anyone else. Congress merely "authorized" the president to do whatever seemeth good to Our Maximum Leader to do. That’s our Congress. Best damn rubber stamp a warlord with a bully pulpit could want.

By the time he came to trial, Padilla’s lawyer (Yes, they finally let him have one) tried to have him declared incompetent to stand trial. Yeah, I’m sure that was just a dodge. Years of solitary confinement with sleep deprivation, interrogation without counsel and no apparent hope for release shouldn’t damage a man’s mind any. This is New World Order his Daddy promised, pal. Get used to it.

In all likelihood, we have not heard the end of this case. Counsel for the other two defendants promised an appeal and it seems all but certain Padilla’s conviction will also be challenged in appeals court. But what appeal do we the people have?

Do we ever learn? One commentator wrote that in a little more than a year, we will have a new president in the White House who will be guided by "loyalty to the Constitution, rather than pernicious self-interest." As Archie Bunker used to say when Edith was in the middle of one of her endless stories, "Help me, Lord!"

First of all, who says Bush, our Boy Benito, has been acting on "pernicious self interest"? Hey, our New Messiah has a nation to defend, an entire world to liberate and free from sin. He is acting from the noblest of motives, which are often the most dangerous.

Secondly, it is remarkable that anyone beyond the age of 12 would assume that the next president will give us an administration notable for its "loyalty to the Constitution." Why would the next president cede any of the powers added to the office of chief executive by Our Supreme Commander? The only reason this president will not likely be succeeded by another George Almighty is that no one named George is currently running for president.

So it will be a Hillary Almighty or a Barak Almighty or Mitt Almighty, John Almighty or, God help us, Rudolph Almighty, Benito III. Funny how the various rulers of the Almighty dynasty look the same.

Family resemblance, I guess.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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"By the time you hitters figure out what to do," Manager Ted Williams once told his Washington Senators, "you’re too old to do it!" Yes, life’s lessons are learned slowly. And by the time I finally realize some of my old teachers were right about a few things, they’re too dead for me to tell them so.

Take the Vietnam War, for example. I was a veteran of that not-so-great war (I liked to call it "World War ‘Nam") by the time I started college and I was still a hawk. In fact, I would guess I was more hawkish than most Viet vets, a seemingly small number of whom had become, la John Kerry, outspoken in opposition to the war. The rest seemed to support it on the general grounds of patriotism and loyalty and anticommunism. I, on the other hand, was ideologically committed.

I scorned, but did not read, the works of men like Bernard Fall ("Hell in a Very Small Place") and others who warned that the U.S. forces were about to go the way of the French at Dienbienphu. What need had I of the counsel of such nefarious naysayers, such bogus Bohemian Bolsheviks, those dissolute, degenerate doomsayers, those nattering nabobs of negativism? I had the speeches of Spiro Agnew. I had my National Review.

Yes, Saigon fell and all that, but that’s not my focus here. I recall that in the years 1969—71, I had a college professor who might have been created by a cartoonist at National Review. Perhaps in his early to mid-forties, he had receding red hair (Communism on the run?), with long muttonchop sideburns and was as liberal as any young conservative could want his middle-aged foil to be. I mean, an ACLU, ADA, prayers-out-of-school, troops-out-of-Vietnam, anti-military-industrial-complex liberal. His political heroes were either dead (Robert Kennedy) or had been muscled out of contention for the White House by the political bosses (Eugene McCarthy). His Great Left Hope, George McGovern would soon capture the Democratic presidential nomination, only to discover it was not worth having.

I remember once having a friendly discussion with this "prof" about the student radicals of the day, the New Left, upon whom he looked with favor while I was appalled. Look, I told him, we don’t need rebellion in the streets. We have a democratic process through which we resolve policy disputes. They’re called elections — or what President Bush in our time has called an "accountability moment."

"Yeah?" the professor said. "What choice did I have in the last election? I could choose between Nixon, who supports the war and Humphrey who supported the war." I saw he had a point. At least I could have yielded to temptation and done what I now consider would have been the sensible thing and voted for third-party candidate George Wallace. Instead, I listened to Barry Goldwater: "Please don’t throw away your vote by voting for George Wallace," Goldwater exhorted conservatives from the cover of Bill Buckley’s National Review.

But for the liberal professor, Wallace was not an option. And neither Wallace, who ran the most successful third-party insurgency since that of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, nor any other candidate outside the two-party "duopoly" had any chance to win, anyway. Yes, my professor friend could have cast a brave and lonely vote for Dick Gregory, Pat Paulsen or some other comedian, but he had no real choice but the "choice" offered in the Republocratic intramural contest. He could vote for a candidate who would continue the war in Vietnam or for his opponent, who would do the same.

In other words, to reverse the battle cry of the Goldwater rebellion in ’64, he had an echo, not a choice. Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum. He could agree with Wallace on one point: "Thay’s not a dahm’s wuth o’ diff’rence" between the two major parties. To reprise a line used by the aforementioned Mr. Buckley about an earlier campaign, the ’68 election was essentially "a debate between the Smith Brothers over cough drops."

Fast forward to 2004. The Democrats looked like they might do something radical and oppose the incumbent with an opposition candidate. Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, had a clear anti-war position, but was perceived as too far left, another potential electoral disaster in the image and likeness of McGovern, who had inspired the American voting public to give a 49-state landslide victory to that old charmer, Richard Nixon. In fact, National Review, hoping for a Republican landslide, put Dean on its cover in ’03 and urged Democrats to "Please Nominate This Man!"

So the Democrats "came to their senses" and nominated John F. Kerry, who was thought to be more moderate, more centrist, less intelligible, more ambiguous. He was for the war before he was against it, but he still wasn’t really against it. And if he knew in ’02 what we all knew in ’04, he still would have voted to give the president the authority to start the war with Iraq, ’cause presidents need that sort of thing, Big John reckoned. But he was for getting out sometime and even suggested he might start — start! — withdrawing the troops early in his second — second — term!

Alas, poor Kerry. A hero in the Vietnam War and then a hero to the anti-war crowd for opposing it, he managed, as presidential candidate, to make peace appear not only unattainable, but incomprehensible.

He was not alone. One of the congressional hopefuls in a Democratic primary in New Hampshire in ’06 sort of opposed the war, but didn’t actually say he wanted to bring the troops home. He said he was after "accountability." After listening to his campaign ads, I wasn’t sure if he wanted to end the war or audit it.

Listen closely to what the "Big Three" Democratic candidates for President — Clinton, Obama, Edwards — are saying and pay even more attention to what they are not saying. They, like some of their Republican counterparts, are trying to have it both ways. Clinton and Edwards, like Kerry, were for the war before they were against it and both voted to authorize the president to start it. But they can’t end it, because they want to be responsible and loyal, supporting the troops and the war on terror and our country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, whose eyes have seen the glory and deliver us from accountability, Amen!

Obama at least opposed the war from the beginning, but is not so "irresponsible" as to propose bringing our troops home now. He might rather redeploy them to Afghanistan or perhaps Pakistan, should we have "actionable intelligence" of a plot there to once again attack America.

The fact that a major candidate for President can still speak with seeming credibility — with a straight face, in other words — about "actionable intelligence" after what has happened in the past five years suggests that the intelligence of the candidates is, with a few notable exceptions, still at "ground zero."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The news about the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis and the search for those missing brings memories of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. At one point during the chaos on the Gulf Coast, former rock-and-roll great Fats Domino was missing and feared dead. Eventually, the legendary "Fat Man" was found alive and well, one of the few bulletins of good news to come out of New Orleans during that unhappy time. I wonder if that will be among the "achievements" highlighted during the next Republican National Convention.

"During the administration of George W. Bush, we FOUND Fats Domino!" Yet the heavily biased mainstream, or "drive by," news media have never given Our Maximum Leader credit for that.

President Bush is said to be working on his "legacy" these days. He seems to be taking a roundabout route — as though the road to the Bush Memorial in Washington, D.C. runs through Baghdad, or maybe Teheran. Whatever. Bush is in it for the long haul and will do whatever it takes.

In New Hampshire there is a long-standing joke about a farmer who, asked for directions to some out of the way place, tells a visiting motorist, "You can’t get there from here!"

It really is a joke, friends. There are no inaccessible parts of New Hampshire, but there are a lot of places to which there is no direct route. You have to go around a lake or cross a bridge in the next town. You can "get there from here," but you have to go somewhere else first.

It’s that way with the space program. We have heard much in the past few decades about the scientific discoveries that have been made and the inventions that have come about as the result of space travel. True, space suits with internal plumbing may have limited mass marketing potential, but think of golf ball aerodynamics, portable coolers and programmable pacemakers for the heart. They are all, NASA tells us, "spinoffs" from the space program. And the theory is the more space travel we undertake, the more useful inventions we will have as a byproduct of those adventures.

It is a roundabout, extraterrestrial route, best described by David Stockman, President Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget. The idea, said Stockman, is that the way to build a better mousetrap is to go to Jupiter.

And, of course, academics are interested in anything that combines discovery with government grants. And what fits that description better than our multi-billion dollar a year space program? New Hampshire is proud to have been the home of the first teacher in space, Concord High’s Christa McAuliffe, who perished along with her fellow astronauts in the Challenger explosion of January 28, 1986. Another teacher is now scheduled for a space flight and will, we may all hope and pray, have a much safer, more successful trip. Meanwhile, the state’s legislature remains under a ten-year-old mandate from the Supreme Court of New Hampshire to come up with a constitutionally equitable plan to fund public education statewide. Perhaps the answer to that dilemma is somewhere in the stars.

It may be that answers to our national and even international problems are "somewhere out there" as well. Charles Krauthammer, the esteemed neo-conservative columnist, recently noted with approval that President George W. Bush, bless his interplanetary heart, has “committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, Mars.”

Earlier, less imaginative generations of Americans labored under the illusion that we must work out the solutions to our worldly problems here on earth, unaware that the answer may be on Mars. Even in the heyday of anti-communism, during the much-maligned "red scare" of the 1950′s, it never occurred to Sen. Joe McCarthy or the House Committee on Un-American Activities that our nation’s security required on invasion of the red planet.

Other, more pedestrian presidents have had as their goals freedom and prosperity for our country and peace on a single planet — ours, no less. But President Bush, has a grander vision, based perhaps on his father’s "thousand points of light." This president is committed to the defense of the moon and Mars.

When Bush first started talking about Mars, the joke was that maybe that’s where we would find those elusive "weapons of mass destruction" that we were unable to find in Iraq. Now it’s beginning to look like the president wants to go to Mars to find the cherished legacy of achievement that has eluded him here on earth. Yes, friends, future generations of Republicans will be able to point with pride to the glorious achievement of America AD (Years of "Dubya").

"He saved Mars from the terrorists."

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

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The exceptional conservative/libertarian writer William Norman Grigg has struck another blow for liberty with his article, appearing on LewRockwell.com on July 23, on "Reich" Wing Republicanism, the Bush League "reductio ad absurdum" of conservatism. Always thorough in his research and documentation, Mr. Grigg provided a helpful link to an article in The Independent of England called "Ship of Fools" by Johann Hari. Mr. Hari had taken a seemingly unremarkable trip with a group of conservative "groupies," whose members had paid $1,200 each for the privilege of going on a cruise with the editorial staff of National Review. NR, long established as the bi-weekly ("fortnightly," as founder and longtime editor William F. Buckley, Jr. used to say) semi-official "bible" of American conservatism, still has star power, despite the retirement several years ago of Buckley, the Moses of the American right.

I won’t recount the Hari article, which any reader can find for himself. I will limit myself to a few observations about the comment that awakened the British journalist from his reverie in the sand of a warm-weather port somewhere in the Pacific. As Hari recalls, he was lying on the beach with Hillary-Ann, whom he describes as a "chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer." What snapped him out of his slumber was the remark, "Of course we need to execute some of these people." Execute whom? he asked. Oh, no one really important and not too many of them, he learned.

"A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," the "chatty, scatty" one explained. "Just take a couple of these antiwar people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get. Then things’ll change," she smiled.

Well, I guess they would, but not in a direction that National Review conservatives used to desire. Is there, I wonder, something inherently goofy about being 35 years old? I was 35 once, but it was long ago and my memory is not perfect. I have a memory of a more recent event in a more recent decade. The year was 1995 and I was with a lady friend at Prescott Park in Portsmouth, NH. We had come to see a play that was part of the Prescott Park Arts festival. One of the glorious treats that the festival offers every summer is the opportunity to watch a full length musical comedy under the stars on a soft summer night alongside the Piscataqua River, with several ships at dockside and a few out on the water. On a nearby island is an imposing cement structure that used to be the Portsmouth Naval Prison. The play we were seeing was "The Great USO Show," about a USO troupe traveling and performing during World War II.

What was special about this play was the story within the story. The story had, along with the musical and comedy entertainment, the kind of conflicts inevitable among any group of people living, working and traveling together. But every so often the performers on stage would freeze in place, the stage would be darkened and the music stopped as a radio voice brought the latest news from "the front." It seemed a very realistic representation of the war as it might have been endured in various military outposts and heard by a nation wired together by radio.

During the intermission, my companion, then age 35, turned to me and asked, "Who won World War II, anyway?" I was startled and she must have noticed my dumbfounded look. "Nobody?" she asked, wondering if it had ended in a stalemate like the Korean "conflict" or some distant dispute in the remote past, like the Thirty Years War.

I hardly knew what to say. I was born the year the war ended and grew up learning of how beastly the Germans and Japanese were. Had we lost, it was widely assumed, we would be speaking German or perhaps Japanese, and that would not be the worst of it. We would be alternately bowing and goose-stepping and would be taking our orders from the Fhrer or the emperor, to whom we would have owed our very existence. The glories of our American republic would be gone forever.

"Who won World War II?" Well, that big, imposing building on the island over there, the U.S. Naval prison closed long ago because conditions there were no longer humane, is not a Nazi gulag, is it?

I dredge all this up from my memory, not to make fun of the dear lady. At least she, unlike Hillary-Ann on the NR cruise, was not eager to see gas chambers enforce "patriotism" in 21st-century America. But as Mr. Buckley once said to a pair of British journalists on his "Firing Line" TV program, "Your absolute ignorance is extraordinary!" (I fondly remember one of them mildly objecting that his ignorance could hardly have been "absolute.") How could this lady have lived in the United States of America from 1960 to 1995 without knowing who won World War II? She had grown up in this fair land, had been graduated in a timely manner from high school and was, at the time, we spoke, taking courses at a nearby college. And yet she was as ignorant of the outcome of the world’s most epic struggle as one of those isolated Japanese warriors discovered years later on some remote island, still waiting for reinforcements.

What saddens me about the report from the "Ship of Fools" is the knowledge that I no longer have reason to expect more of the devoted readers of National Review, that esteemed journal of conservative opinion. When Mr. Buckley founded the magazine in 1955, the inaugural issue proclaimed that the lively, humorous journal would be "standing athwart history, yelling, u2018Stop!’" It was generally understood at the time that what the editors wanted to stop was the drift toward socialism and even a left-wing totalitarianism. Now the magazine and its devotees seem determined to stop any interference with America’s drift — nay, gallop — toward a right-wing totalitarianism.

In fairness to the magazine, the publication and its editors may not reasonably be held responsible for the offhand remarks of one of the groupies on its cruise. But what is so disturbing is that her mindset is not much different from what one finds expressed, albeit with greater prudence and more erudition, in the pages of the magazine itself. I no longer read it regularly, so I’m not sure, but I do not believe the editors have yet called for taking war opponents to the gas chambers. But they have expressed their approval of the Bush regime’s policy of imprisoning indefinitely, without charges or trial, those whom it has classified as "enemy combatants."

National Review defended all along the Bush regime’s years-long imprisonment of American citizen Jos Padilla as an "enemy combatant" until legal actions and pending court hearings prompted the administration to finally charge the Puerto Rico-born American with something (I don’t remember what) and begin legal proceedings against him. More recently, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia, widely regarded as a conservative court, ruled that a foreign national, here legally on a student visa at the time of his arrest, must be charged with a crime and given due process after having been held in a military prison in solitary confinement for five-and-a-half years. The Bush administration has appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a panel discussion on National Public Radio, National Review political editor Byron York said there was a lot of outrage in the conservative movement over this. For a moment, I enjoyed a flash of optimism. Is he saying, I wondered, that conservatives are outraged at the imprisonment and solitary confinement without charge or trial of someone who was here as a guest of one of the most civilized and freedom-loving countries on earth? No, I sadly realized, of course not. The outrage Mr. York vented was at the court over its impudence in attempting to rein in executive power in a time of war.

The suspect came here after 9-11 and was going to be part of a second wave of terrorism, York said. He reported directly to Al Qaeda’s number two man, etc., etc. I wondered: if it is okay for Byron York to "know" all this, why can’t the Justice Department put it before a judge and jury? Perhaps because there is no solid case here and our government is content to let its flunkies, in National Review and elsewhere, make its case, virtually unopposed, in the court of public opinion.

When I discovered National Review in the Goldwater days of my youth, it was a lively, fun magazine, sticking its thumb in the eye of America’s political and intellectual establishments and decrying the excesses of Lyndon Johnson’s "Caesarism." Now National Review likes Caesarism. All that stuff about limited government, the Constitution, a government of laws not men, is now so "pre-911." The only Caesarism that National Review could plausibly oppose now would be Sid’s.

Those old jokes from "Your Show of Shows" are, after all, also pre-911. They come from another era, when National Review claimed to be raising a flag for freedom. We didn’t know that what they were shouting "Stop!" to was the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the grand tradition of liberty under law.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.

DIGG THIS

Former President and Senator Clinton were in New Hampshire on Friday and made a joint appearance at a rally that evening in Victory Park in downtown Manchester, just a few short blocks from where I live. Someone had given me a ticket and it was a nice, warm (quite comfortable, actually) summer evening, so I took a stroll over there to see and hear the Washington Bill-Hillies.

In my role as a free-lance reporter, I saw Sen. Clinton twice in one day earlier this year. But I had never seen “Bubba” in person before, despite his many visits to the Granite State. He is large and makes an impressive appearance. He has always been an engaging speaker. He promised to speak briefly and, of course, broke the promise within the first 20 minutes. No one expected him to keep it, anyway. (It depends, I guess, on what the meaning of “brief” is.) But he was, as always, interesting, folksy, humorous and yes, even right about a few things, like the deficits we are running up and how borrowing money from China to finance tax cuts and a war in Iraq does not speak well of the Republicans’ “fiscal conservatism.” (Maybe President Bush isn’t clear on what the meaning of “conservative” is. He’s probably not too clear on “fiscal,” either. Other than that, he’s got “fiscal conservatism” down cold.)

So I figured he gave his wife, Madame Hillarious, a tough act to follow. But she was up to the task. She talked a little longer than he did. Brevity obviously is not a staple of the Clinton household. Even their pillow talk must sound like a filibuster by Sen. Byrd. (“Will the Senator yield?”) But she was also interesting and no one, not even I, was bored with any of it.

I did cringe a bit when she called a couple of times for support for stem cell research and I briefly considered turning and walking out of there. But I admit there were four or five, maybe even a half dozen times when I applauded things she said. I agree, for example, that if our troops are still in Iraq when the next President takes office in January, 2009, it will be high time to come up with a plan to begin removing them within 60 days. And I agree that we need to do something to end the long delays in medical care for our military people at VA hospitals.

When it was over, I moved up to the low barrier in front of the stage and waited as the Clintons made their way along the barrier, signing autographs. (Signing autographs appears to have supplanted handshakes as the primary way for presidential candidates to “work the crowd.”) I stood there with the card that was the ticket of admission and a book in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other. A young man in a dark suit who was, I guess, a Secret Service agent politely asked me to put the pen away. “They have their own pens,” he assured me.

Well, I guess a ballpoint pen could be weapon. (Do they, I wonder, use James Bond movies as training films for our security agents? They probably would have gone into “red alert” if any of the ladies there had knitting needles with them.) Anyway, they came along, she first and he following just far enough behind that you could get her autograph and get your card, paper or whatever back in time to get his, too. I would guess it is quite an art, because they managed to chat just enough with each person to make each feel as though he or she had established, ever so briefly, a point of contact and made some sort of bond with the former President and First Lady.

I actually managed to chat a little with the distinguished Senator, whom I actually consider the better (meaning less awful) senator from New York, since Charles “UpChuck” Schumer almost always causes me to see red. I might have told her that considering how awful Schumer is, I consider her the best U.S. Senator New York has right now. But that thought didn’t occur to me at the time.

What did come to mind was that at the recent debate at Saint Anselm College, former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska said that as President, he would probably send former President Clinton abroad on some sort of goodwill mission and “He can take his wife with him. She’ll still be in the senate.”

So as the senator approached I asked her where she might send Sen. Gravel in the next Clinton administration.

“Oh, I don’t know what he’ll be doing,” she said with a grin.

“Well, you could send him on a goodwill mission around the world, right?” I suggested, helpfully.

“Well, some parts, anyway,” she replied as she signed.

“And he could take his wife with him, right?”

“Well, some places,” she said. Then she said Sen. Gravel is a remarkable man. “He has a tremendous amount of energy.”

“And he has a good sense of humor,” I added.

“Yes, he does,” she agreed. How about that? In 1964, when Hillary Rodham was a “Goldwater girl” we doubtless would have agreed on a great many things. Forty-three years later, we could still find a few things to agree on. But not many. I’m still for Goldwater for President.

Anyway, I got my card back from the Senator and in a few seconds was able to hand it to the former President. (The timing was remarkable.) As I did, I recalled that in Dover, New Hampshire on the night before the primary in 1992, a hoarse Bill Clinton promised to be with the people of New Hampshire “’till the last dog dies!”

“I guess that last dog still hasn’t died,” I said as he was signing for me.

“Not even close,” he said with a self-satisfied grin. That’s our “Bubba.” Just a good ol’ Rhodes scholar.

All in all, it was a good show. And since it started shortly after 6 p.m., I was able to walk over to a nearby lounge for dinner and a Red Sox game on television. Life is good.

Still, I’m not going to vote for Mme. Hillarious. I expect to vote for Ron Paul in the New Hampshire primary. But I do feel privileged to live in New Hampshire and see and hear all these presidential candidates and to see and listen to a former president speak in a park just a few blocks away from my home just before he goes off to Africa to do something (I don’t know just what) about AIDS there.

Another former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, will be buried in Texas on Saturday. Mrs. Johnson was an Episcopalian, but her younger daughter, Lucy Baines, is a Catholic and had a Catholic priest there at the end to give her mother last rites.

Requiem in pacem.

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny [send him mail] is a freelance writer.