By Jeffrey Page
Peter King, basking in the warmth of the House Republican majority that gave him the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, has chosen to investigate Islam in America. Wait. Not Islam, per se, but the extent to which Muslims here in the United States have been radicalized. Whatever that means.

What King, as chairman, has chosen not to investigate, or even talk about as a rank-and-file member of the House, is the extent to which the Republican party itself has been radicalized.

Item: Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, would have you believe that state workers got the wages and fringe benefits they enjoy by pointing a gun at the heads of previous governors. Actually, they got their pay through collective bargaining. You know, two sides negotiating a deal each could live with. Walker’s solution, with Wisconsin facing a $3 billion deficit? End collective bargaining with public sector unions. Walker knows and I know, and you know and everybody with a brain knows that an end to collective bargaining is the end of public unions. And that’s not a radical position? Ending the process that gave workers a chance to join the middle class?

Item: The leadership of the Republican party is afraid to confront some of its more radicalized members and inform them that President Obama was born in the United States and that to continue the “birther” nonsense – that he really came from Kenya or some distant planet – makes the GOP look like a bunch of fools. Radical fools, but fools nonetheless.

Item: Chairman King, who has grandly titled his hearings “The Extent of Radicalization of the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response” has thus far declined to call for hearings titled “The Extent of Radicalization of the Westboro Baptist Church Community and That Community’s Response.” Westboro of course is the church in Topeka, Kan. that sends its people around the country to picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their incredible reasoning: Homosexuality is a sin; America tolerates homosexuality; soldiers defend America; therefore the dead soldiers were killed defending homosexuality. This, they contend, allows them to display such signs as “God Hates Fags.” And King is bent out of shape about Muslims.

Item: King ought to check in with the Tea Party and see who’s been radicalizing this group that scares the hell out of the GOP every time mainstream Republicans do something the Tea Party finds annoying. It was at a Tea Party forum on health care a couple of years ago in Greenwood Lake when a man opposed to national health care declared: “I resent the administration’s comparing me to a brown shirt or a Nazi” when in fact no one in President Obama’s administration had said any such thing. I have seen signs at these rallies showing Obama and a lion with the wording “African Lion? Or Lyin’ African?” And I have seen the signs showing Obama with the racist message “Monkey See, Monkey Spend.” What I have not seen is King mouthing any degree of concern over these displays of radicalization.

Item: Sarah Palin runs around the country mouthing big ideas about this issue or that but when you listen, you get a creepy feeling that she’s reciting a GOP nursery rhyme. Yet there are elements in the Republican party that see her as a serious contender for the presidential nomination next year. How radical is that? A genuine know-nothing thinking about running America.

Item: King might want to investigate his own radicalism. The Times on Wednesday ran a fascinating story in which it quoted King in his 1985 defense of the Irish Republican Army. “If civilians are killed in an [I.R.A.] attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable,” he said, “but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”

King should learn that he doesn’t encounter radicalism only on the left. It’s out there among every group – such as his.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

Donald Rumsfeld

By Jeffrey Page
Is there no escaping this man? As Donald Rumsfeld makes the rounds to plug his new book it is useful to remember that he treated 300 million Americans as so many idiot nephews and moron nieces, all with stupid questions about the war that he, the belabored secretary of defense (and kindly uncle), was put upon to answer.

He’ll likely be best remembered for his comment in 2002 on the report of Baghdad’s selling weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. It was obfuscation defined: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

The translation, for people who, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, did not happen to have graduated from the Al Kelly Academy of Doubletalk: Mind your own god damned business and leave this war to the professionals, like me.

If President George W. Bush had had much in the way of integrity – or at least some genuine connection with the people of this country – he would have fired Rumsfeld on the spot. But Rumsfeld survived and his contempt for those who would question him continues with his titling his book “Known and Unknown.”

For me, Rumsfeld’s worst insult was to the people who actually fight the nation’s wars. It came during his visit to U.S. troops in Kuwait in 2004.

He took questions. All was going swimmingly until a member of the Tennessee National Guard asked why infantry troops had to scrounge through Iraqi landfills in search of discarded metal that they then fastened to their light vehicles to protect themselves from roadside bombs.

Why, Specialist Thomas Wilson asked, didn’t the trucks come with this protection already attached and ready for use? The troops, assembled for what should have been a benign photo-op for Rumsfeld, cheered and applauded Wilson.

Rumsfeld answered as though he were a battle weary, seen-it-all lieutenant colonel (though he bought himself a little time by asking for the question to be repeated) and proceeded to dismiss Wilson as some unsophisticated dimwit.

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have,” Rumsfeld lectured. And in an instant, America understood that the idiot in the room was not Specialist Wilson but Secretary Rumsfeld.

In fact, you’d go to war without the army you wish if the war involved enemy troops invading, say, Nyack or Hoboken or Newburgh. But if Rumsfeld was suggesting that he faced such a dangerous emergency in Iraq that he couldn’t wait for the proper protective shields to be shipped to the troops, how then could he ever explain the fact that it took him 18 months after 9/11 to get his military ready to fight in Iraq? He could not, of course.

Rumsfeld would not have sent troops into battle without ammunition, and he should not have sent them into battle with improperly equipped vehicles. Didn’t he read the casualty reports about his soldiers being killed and maimed by roadside bombs? Everyone else did.

But Rumsfeld supposedly was smarter than everyone else, so if the people of the United States, including those whose sons and daughters were fighting this war, didn’t get it, well, that was too bad.

Rumsfeld smart? He was dumb as a post.

Such as during the 18-month stroll-up to the war – it could hardly be called a run-up – when Rumsfeld declared: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks, or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.”

That was about eight years ago.

Asked about troops being held over in the war zone after their tours of duty were up, Rumsfeld responded: “Oh come on, people are fungible. You can have them here or there.” He must have forgotten that “fungible” is associated with the easy replacement of goods, not people.

Once, noting mounting U.S. casualties, Rumsfeld had the gall to declare: “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

I wonder if he ever mentioned that observation in his letters of condolence – the letters he signed not with his hand but with a mechanical device – to the fathers and mothers, the husbands and wives, and the kids of the soldiers killed in the futile search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld told us those weapons would be easy to find. Ten days before the first U.S. troops invaded Iraq he said, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”

That was eight years ago, too.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The old line about everyone’s having the chance to be president is really beginning to worry me. Does it include Sarah Palin? She’s behaving like it does. She travels around the country, speaks before big audiences, avoids the press, recently hired a political consultant, and has a loyal following of people in the Tea Party movement who think she’s just pretty darned terrific, don’t you know.

But fun time is over and it’s important to draw the line, and pronounce that if you don’t really have a grasp of what’s going on in the world, well, then, no, you can’t be president.

My distress was brought on by a Palin quote that’s making its way through the Internet. In case you missed it, Palin was sitting for an interview by David Brody, the Washington bureau chief of the Christian Broadcasting Network. The subject was Egypt. Here’s what Palin had to say at one point in her talk with Brody:

“It’s a difficult situation. This is that 3 a.m. White House phone call and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that call went right to the answering machine. And nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know, who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak. And no, not, not real enthused about what it is that is being done on a national level from D.C. in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt and in in these areas that are so volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt, but the other countries, too, where we are seeing uprisings. We know that, now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for, so we know who it is that America will stand with. And we do not have all that information yet.”

I must note right here that I have seen other versions of this response in which the punctuation has been skewed to make look like a moron. But the quote above is taken directly from her CBN interview as shown on YouTube.

It’s time to end the Palin fun and games. I’m waiting for some honest, intelligent, America-loving Republicans to take their party back and inform Palin: No, Sarah, you can’t be president.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
By rights, George Allen and Chuck Schumer should have disappeared from the national political stage, but the rules are different for politicians like these two characters with loose mouths. Allen is the Republican from Virginia who was defeated for another term in 2006, Schumer is the Democrat from New York who should have been defeated for a third term in 2010 but who was reelected.

Allen used a racial slur against a young man during the 2006 campaign. Schumer used a slur against a woman last year. Had you called an Indian-American man a “macaca” or if you called a woman a “bitch” while on the job, chances are you’d be canned. A good example of this are the three firefighters in Secaucus, N.J. who resigned two years ago rather than face charges that they harassed a gay couple living near the fire house. This week, the town voted not to rehire them. They’re gone, as well they should be.

Allen has announced he will seek to get his old seat back, and this week, the man who defeated him in ’06, Jim Webb, announced he would not seek another term. So, Allen, who should have been banished to an island someplace in Arctic waters, is back as a contender, not even having to campaign against an incumbent in next year’s race.

Allen, popular in Virginia, was on the stump in 2006 when he noticed a young man videotaping his speech. The man looked familiar. He was working for the Virginia Democratic Committee and following Allen wherever he went. I imagine this could prove very annoying to a senator. I imagine too that senators with any sense would just button it up and understand that this is part of modern political campaigning.

Not George Allen. He addressed the young man directly. Twice he referred to him as “macaca,” a term reserved by certain moronic white people such as Allen, to describe certain dark skinned people such as S.K. Sidarth, the man with the camcorder.

“Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen continued. This was a stupid thing to say because it contained an unmistakable hint that young Mr. Sidarth was somehow suspect, maybe not even an American. But the truth of course was that S.K. Sidarth was born in California and raised in Virginia. He was as American as the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, George Allen.

Will America have the opportunity of listening to the outrageous George Allen again, maybe even in the Senate chamber? Only if we run out of luck.

Schumer, meanwhile, was rolling along last year toward an easy reelection against a candidate no one ever heard of, when he uttered an Allenism of his own, though in fairness maybe it was Allen who uttered a Schumerism.

Schumer was aboard an airliner for the flight to New York. With the plane still on the ground, Schumer was talking on his cell phone. A flight attendant asked him to hang up because he was delaying the takeoff. He ignored her. She asked again. This time he complied and, as she walked away, he turned to his traveling companion, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and uttered his one-word assessment of the flight attendant: “Bitch.” He was overheard by a Republican operative on the plane and soon his defamation was on the national wires.

One might be tempted to say that had Schumer dismissed a black person or a Hispanic person with slurs comparable to “bitch,” he would be a senator no longer. But this is America, land of the free ride. Schumer was reelected, and now George Allen gets a second bite of the apple.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The story from Arizona last spring was strange enough: The bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix announced that he had excommunicated Margaret McBride, an administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, because she had approved an abortion for a patient.

Not just any patient, but a 27-year old woman, a mother of four, suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition that, according to The Arizona Republic, severely limits heart and lung function and likely would kill her if she carried her pregnancy to term. The Republic newspaper also noted that it was the doctors at St. Joseph’s who recommended ending the pregnancy, not the other way around.

And not just any Margaret McBride, but Sister Margaret McBride, a nun of the Sisters of Mercy.

The bishop, Thomas J. Olmsted, had another announcement. The church, he said last month, was ending its affiliation with St. Joseph’s because that’s where the abortion was performed but also because the hospital said it had no intention of eliminating abortions when it came to saving the life of the mother.

I don’t understand Bishop Olmsted’s reasoning.

When he excommunicated Sister Margaret he said that anyone who “formally cooperates” in an abortion is automatically excommunicated. Recently, however, he offered a prayer at the opening of the Arizona Legislature’s new session. His prayer recollected the shooting massacre in Tucson and at one point Bishop Olmsted declared: “We pray for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and all who were injured and for those who love and care for them.”

Congresswoman Giffords is not a Catholic so of course she can’t be excommunicated. But she has a 100 percent approval rating from NARAL – the National Abortion Rights Action League.

On one hand the pain of excommunication for a nun. On the other a specific mention of a pro-choice politician in a prayer for recovery. Yet it would seem that by the bishop’s definition, both formally cooperated in abortion.

Bishop Olmsted’s absolutism is not limited to the issue of abortion. Four years ago, the bishop refused to give communion to an autistic 10-year old boy who was physically unable to swallow the host.

I thought about that boy and recalled St. Mark quoting Jesus: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” It seemed that what was good for Jesus certainly ought to be good for a bishop. The boy’s father had even offered to grind up the wafer in his own mouth and then transfer some of it to his son. No good, Bishop Olmsted said.

Two years ago Bishop Olmsted took President Obama to task for ending George W. Bush’s straitjacket limits on embryonic stem cell research.

Since the bishop is so uncompromising in his moral stands, can we assume that he carries a card in his wallet stating that in the event of his illness or injury, he automatically declines all medication, surgery or other treatment that has come about as a result of embryonic stem cell research? Moreover, can we assume that he has made such identification cards available to everyone in the diocese, a card each for every mom and dad and one for each child?

I couldn’t find a word about Bishop Olmsted’s carrying such a no-thank-you card.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I came across a remarkable double standard in crime reporting at The New York Times.

The paper ran a story on Saturday about the arrest of a man who had been sending bizarre love letters to Tatiana Schlossberg, 20, the daughter of Edwin Schlossberg and Caroline Kennedy. You know who they are.

The letters make your skin crawl. “I know you. I know the feeling of you,” the Times quoted from one of the more recent letters. “I know your shape, your sound, your warmth and your taste.”

The Times identified the man and informed us that he was 41 years old, unemployed, a native of Pakistan and a naturalized United States citizen. Ever see information like that in a story about a frightening yet relatively minor crime? The man’s name is Naeem Ahmed. By publishing usually omitted information, was the Times implying some kind of connection between a Middle Eastern name and an obnoxious intrusion into the lives of a famous family?

If not, why was the use of Ahmed’s place of birth and citizenship status necessary for the story?

Maybe the answer lay in another story in Saturday’s paper.

It was the extraordinary account of the arrests of three men – a sheriff, a county attorney, and a hospital administrator – in West Texas, all charged with prosecuting two nurses who informed state medical authorities of alleged improper activities at the local hospital.

The Times reported the charges and the background, but carried not a word about where they were born or their citizenship – perhaps because the sheriff’s name is Roberts, the county attorney’s name is Tidwell and the administrator’s name is Wiley. Good old easy-to-pronounce Anglo-Saxon names. Americans through and through, presumably. If Sheriff Roberts had been born in Inner Mongolia we don’t know because the Times didn’t think it was necessary to note his place of birth. We can assume the sheriff is an American citizen, but what about that administrator?

I was going to write a letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor, to ask for an explanation of the two treatments. But then I read his weekend column about the Times web site’s wildly incorrect report that Gabrielle Giffords had died of her wounds in Tucson. This blunder got into the story when the reporter writing it informed his editor that he had, in Brisbane’s words, “a few changes he wanted to make.”

Since when is the assassination of a member of Congress considered one of “a few changes?” His editor never saw the change. And so, the revised story, incorrectly noting Giffords’ death, ran. It was corrected 10 long minutes later.

An editor told Brisbane that “everything” should go past two editors.

Considering the case of Naeem Ahmed, the same standard – two editors signing of on a story – might have worked at the city desk and not made the Times look like a place with different rules for dealing with people of different backgrounds.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.