By Jeffrey Page

I want to say something nice about Bill O’Reilly, a man whose typically loud, boisterous, and right-wing protestations usually annoy the hell out of me.

But first some background. In 2006, the Rev. Fred Phelps and some of his acolytes picketed the funeral in suburban Maryland of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a Marine who died in a vehicle accident in Al Anbar Province in Iraq. He was 20 years old.

Picket a funeral? Phelps’s people carried signs with incendiary messages such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” None of the Phelps gang had any knowledge of the life or death of Matthew Snyder. Their reasoning for terrorizing the mourners at a small cemetery in suburban Maryland was this: America has allowed itself to be subsumed by gay culture. Matthew Snyder and other fallen soldiers enlisted in the armed services to defend and protect America. So it follows that Snyder and the others must have been gay. And therefore they are despised by the Lord.

The cruelty and the ignorance are monumental.

But not only does God despise the dead soldiers, Phelps says. He also hates their families and their friends. He hates their ministers. He hates their military commanders. He hates everybody who ever had anything to do with them.

Phelps is good at naming all the people God hates, but you start to wonder how he can ignore the guidance of 1 John 4:8: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

Phelps’s disgrace at the Snyder funeral was just one of hundreds of similar demonstrations. I first came in contact with Phelps and the people from his Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas four years ago when I wrote columns for The Record in Hackensack. It was Phelps’s daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper who informed me that God hates not only the individual soldiers but everyone associated with them.

After speaking with several of Phelps’s victims – relatives of fallen soldiers – I finally understood the extent of his savagery. He visits a cemetery where a soldier is being interred, makes his God-awful noise and then prances happily back to Kansas, leaving the soldier’s family devastated and at a loss to understand the degree of his hatred.

Most people try to get past it.

Not Matthew Snyder’s dad, Albert Snyder. He sued Phelps for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and won a $5 million judgment in a federal trial court. But Phelps appealed and not only had the judgment against him reversed, but got an order from the appellate judges requiring Albert Snyder to reimburse him for $16,510 in costs.

Enter O’Reilly. “That is an outrage and I will pay Mr. Snyder’s obligation,” O’Reilly said on March 31. “I am not going to let this injustice stand.” Bravo for a man who puts his money where his mouth is.

Incidentally, the case has been accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Regarding O’Reilly: This my second gentle encounter with him. Several years ago I was writing a series of columns about an epidemic of child murders in New Jersey. It seemed to me there wasn’t as much outrage over the killings as you’d expect. The news stories seemed to come and go, and I don’t recall any especially passionate opinion pieces on these wretched felonies.

But there was O’Reilly on the Fox News Network displaying admirable rage at people who would kill an infant. He yelled. He slammed his hand on his desk. At least in that one area, I was a fan.

Our agreement on Phelps is not complicated: A family has a right to grieve its loss without a bunch of yahoos celebrating the death. Can it be any plainer than that?

Albert Snyder had the guts to sue and he got screwed. Cheers to O’Reilly for offering to write a check. A Snyder family spokeswoman told me that any money left over from what Albert Snyder has to pay Phelps would go toward a scholarship in Matthew’s name.

I decided to send my own check to Barley Snyder at 100 East Market St., York, Pa. 17401.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Dear Oliver S. and Stanley A.,

I read the story in The Times about Massachusetts authorities charging nine high school students in the death of a young girl who committed suicide rather than face more of their taunts, bullying and physical attacks. And I thought of you. And I thought of me.

Looking back to the late Fifties, I’m tempted to say that Forest Hills High School was a building full of 4,000 snobs or would-be snobs – young people living up to the sweet cachet of the words “Forest Hills” with its wealth and status. But this wouldn’t be fair. The fact is that there were some really decent kids at that school. You (whose identities I have fudged) were two of them. I wish I’d been one of them.

“Forest Hills” conjured coolness, prestige and privilege, and I – the son of working-class parents – should have known better than to strive to be part of it. Not that it ultimately mattered. I was never accepted by the student elite, those people who basically ran the social life of the school. They set the standards and if they thought your crew cut was goofy or if they saw you in the corridor with one side of your Ivy League button-down collar forgetfully unbuttoned they’d let you and everybody nearby know about it.

I remember the school as a place where a lot of kids wished they could be somewhere higher in the pecking order of adolescence, which was – and probably still is – the pecking order of misery.

Was the staff at Forest Hills aware of the pain and misery the cool kids inflicted on you? I don’t know. But at South Hadley High School, the district attorney says, teachers and administrators knew full well about the physical attacks and verbal abuse being heaped on Phoebe Prince, 15, and did nothing to stop it. Phoebe Prince is the girl who hanged herself in January. The charges against some of the students include statutory rape, and I’m forced to wonder if a staff member’s silence makes him guilty of being an accessory to a felony.

The aristocrats at Forest Hills High School were the student government types, cheerleaders and athletes. They wore great clothes. They got great grades. To believe them, not one of them was still a virgin. Teachers loved them. The principal loved them.

I thought I could edge my way up, but of course could not.

And there were people like you, Oliver and Stanley. You didn’t fit into “Forest Hills.” Your scrawniness was an object of derision in the locker room. Oliver, you were the one who made a noise like a shriek when someone not-quite-playfully punched you in the arm while smirking and asking what you were doing on Friday night, when the cool people would hang out on Continental Avenue. Stanley, you were the one who giggled excitedly, loudly and almost uncontrollably when you won an argument in class or in the hallway.

The two of you could outthink any comer in that damned school. But you weren’t cool and so you were dismissed as weird.

But you were such decent guys. And if I had been a little more decent myself, I wouldn’t have stood there, mute, while the cool kids imitated the way you walked, mocked the way you talked, laughed at the way you dressed, and sneered at your very existence.

I could have said something. I could have stepped in. I could have been your friend. I could have told those assholes to lay off. I could have suggested that we go bowling, see a movie, or just go for a Coke on Continental Avenue.

But I – with my lousy grades, my proletarian background, my acne, my virginity – was a coward who had other business. That was to be accepted by people who despised me as much as they loathed you. But I said nothing in your behalf, for which I’m ashamed.

I just went along, playing the inelegant schlub to the elite, available for errand running. Such as the time a young blond knockout (very cool) said, “If you see Larry, tell him to call me,” which I did, and which assured my continued role as drone and the complete insanity of my even thinking about asking her to go out to a movie.

I haven’t seen you two guys since graduation, but have thought of you many times over five decades. I hope you are alive and well. I hope your lives have been happy and productive. I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you how I wish I had had the courage to be a better friend when they made your lives miserable with their taunts, and when I made your lives miserable with my unforgivable silence.

I am so sorry.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Some Republicans in Congress believe that in the great scheme of things, Ronald Reagan ranks one step behind God and a billion steps in front of everyone else. And so, they’re calling for the U.S. $50 bill to be redesigned. Off would go the bewhiskered Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general and 18th president, and on would go Reagan, the movie actor and 40th president.

Such a switch would be a mistake. I’m not interested in preserving Grant for Grant’s sake. If the United States is tired of Grant, it could opt for Eisenhower or Truman, Kennedy or Albert Einstein.  In fact, the nation has redesigned its money before. The dime, for example, used to bear the image of the goddess Liberty wearing a winged cap. And in 1946, just one year after he died, Franklin Roosevelt’s image replaced Liberty’s.

But Reagan?

If for no reason other than his moronic decision to lay a wreath at the German military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, Reagan’s picture ought to remain in the family albums and the scrapbooks of his followers, and not on American currency.

Twenty-five years ago, Reagan was asked by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to visit the cemetery where 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Also interred at Bitburg were the remains of 49 others.

Those 49 had served with almost 1 million others not in the Army but in the SS, the military-police wing of the Nazi party that amounted to Hitler’s personal army. The SS was the muscle for some of the greatest atrocities the Nazis inflicted.

In one of the more embarrassing screw-ups of his administration, Reagan’s people were unaware of the SS graves until after he had accepted Kohl’s invitation. Informed, finally, Reagan refused to change his plans. To Bitburg he would go.

Reagan, whose eyesight kept him out of combat during World War II, spent the war years in California making movies for the Army. As president, he ignored the requests of World War II veterans to cancel or change the visit. The vets weren’t concerned so much about the 2,000 regular troops buried at Bitburg. It was the 49. And vets had something to say in this matter. Nearly 410,000 Americans troops were killed in the war against Germany and its ally Japan.

Jews, too, asked Reagan to avoid Bitburg. Jews knew something about death in great numbers as well. Even the House and Senate got into the dispute, both adopting resolutions opposing the visit to the Bitburg cemetery. But Reagan was determined to go.

It was to persuade Reagan not to visit the cemetery that Elie Wiesel uttered his much quoted plea: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

It made no difference. Reagan preferred to ignore American veterans, Congress, and Jewish Americans rather than confront Kohl, tell him that a mistake had been made, and insist on finding a cemetery without graves of SS murderers.

On the same day he visited the Bitburg cemetery, Reagan also visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where 50,000 people are buried, and served up some of his typical sentimental tripe. “Here they lie,” he was quoted by The New York Times. “Never to hope. Never to pray. Never to love. Never to heal. Never to laugh. Never to cry.”

I’m not sure about healing and laughing, but I imagine that anyone caught in the Nazi killing machine did plenty of hoping, and plenty of praying, loving, and crying.

If Reagan believed a visit to Bergen-Belsen somehow balanced his wreath-laying at Bitburg, he was a fool.

Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill would be an absurdity.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Glenn Beck, in his bizarre rant encouraging Christians to quit their churches if they see the words “economic justice” or “social justice” on the bulletin board or hear them in the pastor’s homily, has thrown down an unanticipated gauntlet. He thought he was challenging liberals, but serious churchgoers of all political persuasions must respond to his ignorance.

Beck, on his radio show, linked social and economic justice to the worst politics the world has yet to produce. “Social justice was the rallying cry – economic justice and social justice – the rallying cry on both the communist front and the fascist front,” he said. And just in case you didn’t get it, he went on to say that “social justice” and “economic justice” are “code words,” presumably for communism and nazism.

A quick aside: If “social justice” is code for communism, is Beck telling us that “no social justice” is code for capitalism? Now that’s a revelation.

I’m sure this will take Beck by surprise but social and economic justice are synonyms for Christianity and most other faiths. Additionally, ask most people and they’d tell you that social justice and economic justice are worthy ideals.
 
Beck would have you believe that he knows something you don’t. But in fact, he’s just a fool who sees subversion when churches lend a hand to people who are broke. And he sees a plot when members of the clergy wage campaigns against such conditions as poverty, bad education, fifth rate medical care and lifetimes of lousy, underpaying jobs.

That’s not the kind of job Beck has. The Times reported in 2008 that he had signed a contract extension with Premiere Radio Networks for $50 million over five years. That’s $10 million a year to slander good people doing good works.

His ignorance and cruelty are astounding.

He apparently is unaware of Proverbs 31:9:  “Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”

And of Proverbs 21:13: “Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard.”

Let us cut to the chase. Do you think Beck is aware of Jesus’ first 13 words in the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Clearly, Beck was addressing people who worship at liberal or middle-of-the-road churches and who share – with parishioners at conservative churches – a basic belief that Jesus Christ knew what he was talking about.

For many people “economic justice” and “social justice” are code words all right – not for nazism and communism but for a society that cares for all its people including those whose incomes are substantially less than $10 million a year and who are forced to ask for food when their kids are hungry, a job when they’re out of work, treatment when they’re sick.

So far, the Times has reported that the Rev. Jim Wallis, who heads a Christian antipoverty organization in Washington has implored listeners to turn off Beck’s radio show. Wallis is No. 1. Who’s next?

And which minister and/or parishioner of a politically conservative church or social justice agency will inform Beck that his likening of social justice with communism and fascism was ill-informed, childish, and an affront to all good people of faith, no matter their politics?

Who will tell him that when he says “If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish,” he reveals an enormous ignorance about one of the fundamental tenets of Christian churches – to love thy neighbor as thyself?

Has anyone heard from Pat Robertson lately?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

“Left face!” Sgt. Al Minicus would bark at his trainees at Fort Dix and, invariably, 65 men would turn their bodies 90 degrees to the left, and one or two would turn to the right.

“You’re so damned dumb, you’d f**k up a wet dream,” Minicus would shout into the face of a soldier who turned the wrong way. It’s a line that can’t be explained but whose meaning is understood immediately.

And so we turn to the dreams of New York Democrats. One year ago they had the world by the tail. Comptroller Alan Hevesi had resigned two years earlier and talk of his idiotic use of state workers to chauffeur his wife had pretty much faded. And Governor Eliot Spitzer, who had paid high priced hookers to do that which he wished done, was out of office for nearly a year. The punch line “Eliot Spitzer” was heard less and less.

The Democrats had elected a promising new president. They were in solid control of the House and Senate. Rep. Charles Rangel was chairman of the important Ways and Means Committee. A House freshman, Eric Massa, had won a seat in a traditionally Republican district on Lake Erie. After eight years of Bush and Cheney, Pataki and Joe Bruno, this looked like the Democrats’ time.

But they have spent the better part of a year acting very strangely and through it all, there was a large nonpartisan constituency watching and wondering: Whoa, is this the party to fix things?

–Last spring, Democratic State Senator Pedro Espada defected to the Republicans. The Senate ground to a halt; important legislation was put on hold. Then Espada kissed some Democratic rings, or maybe it was the other way around. He defected back. And Senate Democrats welcomed him by making him their majority leader. Truly, this was Marx Brothers material.

–Recently, another senator, Democrat Hiram Monserrate, learned that – you know? – you’re just not allowed to drag your girlfriend around by her hair and shoulders. Monserrate was convicted of misdemeanor assault. In a rare display of political courage the Senate kicked him out. He won’t go quietly. He’s threatening to sue.

–Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is looking into reports that Governor Paterson had staff and/or the state police contact the ex-girlfriend of his confidante to get her to withdraw a request for an order of protection against the aide, David Johnson. Some are calling for Paterson to resign.

–Recently, two important members of Paterson’s administration quit – his criminal justice adviser (“good conscience,” she said, made her continued service impossible) and his communications director (“good conscience,” he said, dictated that he leave). Oh, and the head of the state police retired.

–Rangel gave up his chairmanship of Ways and Means as suggestions of lapses of ethical conduct swirled about him. One charge is that Rangel took trips to the Caribbean that were paid for by corporations. This is not allowed but don’t be too hard on Rangel. After all, he’s only been in the House of Representatives for the last 39 years. And there’s also an unresolved matter of possible income tax evasion.

–Massa used to be a Republican. Now’s he’s a Democrat. He says the reason a staffer went public about Massa’s alleged sexual harassment is that the White House is out to get him because he doesn’t like President Obama’s health reform plan. So he resigned. Then the Times ran a story about Massa’s interview on an upstate radio station in which he confirmed that, at a party in January, he  “grabbed the aide, joked about having sexual relations with him and mussed his hair before getting up and leaving.” The aide’s complaint is now in the hands of the House Ethics Panel.

–Toss in the White House’s insane non-response over the summer as the Tea Partiers grabbed headlines on Page 1 on the matter of health reform. Did the geniuses in the Obama Administration think the Tea Party people would get it off their chests and then just go home?

Twelve months ago, the Democrats were sitting on top of the world. Nowadays, they’re sitting on one another. And that’s no dream.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Six days after she inhaled the spores, Kathy T. Nguyen was dead, the only New Yorker to die in the anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation in the weeks after 9/11. From the time she took sick on Oct. 25, 2001 until her death six days later, the press usually referred to her as little more than a lonely woman living in a rented apartment in the Bronx.
 
Last week, the FBI announced the conclusion of its nearly decade-long investigation into the anthrax terror with a finding that an Army biologist, who committed suicide in 2008, mailed the spores that infected 22 people and killed five. And even last week, Nguyen was mentioned in news accounts as “a hospital employee.”

In 2001 I was a reporter at The Record in Hackensack. In the fearful days after the 9/11 attacks, when anthrax spores were mailed to senators and news organizations, my editor and I agreed that no one should go to her grave with just a job title as her obituary. This is what I learned about Kathy Nguyen.

Who was she? Nguyen was one of the few Asians living in Crotona Park East, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood. One of her neighbors, Ana Rodriguez, recalled that she and Nguyen cooked for each other in their own ethnic styles. “She used to make me Vietnamese wonton soup and I used to cook Puerto Rican for her,” Rodriguez said. “She was a beautiful woman. She didn’t socialize or go out a lot.”

Others said she was an easy touch for neighbors in need of a few dollars and that she most likely died with some money owed her.

Gina Ramjassingh and Kathy Nguyen had become best friends when they worked at a downtown clothing factory. Nguyen was in charge of distributing patterns and fabrics to Ramjassingh and the other seamstresses. The two friends used to go out to the movies on Friday nights, and for a while, Ramjassingh lived in Nguyen’s building on Freeman Street until she got married and moved to Queens.

Kathy Thi Nguyen was born in Saigon in 1940 and raised by an uncle after her parents died, Ramjassingh said. She married a man who was later killed in the war; Ramjassingh didn’t know on which side he fought. Nguyen told her friend she had owned a tavern in Saigon and that she got on well with the Americans.

Nguyen and her husband had a son. In one of the mysteries of her life, Nguyen turned her son over to a cousin – the son of the uncle who had raised her – left Vietnam, and traveled to the United States. Her priest and most of her friends said this was around 1979. She sent money to her cousin for the care of her son. Later she got word that her son had died, Ramjassingh said.

After she became a U.S. citizen Nguyen married a man in California. Ramjassingh said Nguyen told her this was a marriage of convenience to a Chinese man who wanted quick citizenship. After he got his papers, he disappeared.

Eventually, around 1991, Kathy Nguyen left the clothing factory and got a job as a stockroom clerk at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. In the next 10 years of her life, she established an exemplary attendance record at the hospital, and it was this devotion to her employers that might have contributed to her death.

On a Thursday in late October, just 44 days after Sept. 11, Nguyen experienced chills and muscle pain. The next day, she still felt very sick, but instead of getting herself to a doctor or an emergency room, she insisted on going to work because in her decade at Manhattan Ear and Ear she had never called in sick.

On Saturday her condition worsened.

On Sunday she had shortness of breath, a bad cough and chills. A friend took her to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital where she was admitted when her illness was diagnosed as inhalation anthrax, the most serious form of the disease.

She had reduced liver function on Monday and had trouble breathing on Tuesday. On Wednesday, she died.

Because Nguyen was unconscious much of the time during her illness, authorities never interviewed her. Where could she have contracted anthrax? They searched her apartment, examined her mailbox, her workplace. Nothing. Then they checked her clothing and found a few spores on a coat. One line of reasoning at the time held that she might have picked them up on a crowded subway train. Or maybe a benign letter addressed to her had come in contact, in the vast postal system, with an envelope containing anthrax spores on its way to someone else.

There are no public monuments to the memory of this lost New Yorker save her gravesite in the Holy Cross section of St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.

A lonely woman? Kathy Nguyen had no family left, but 400 people crowded into St. John Chrysostom Roman Catholic Church for her funeral mass. They were her friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even her landlord, officers of her union, Local 1199 of the Health and Hospital Workers, and officials of the hospitals where she worked and where she died.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

A friend of mine says President Obama could arrange for the Second Coming and he’d still be dismissed by a certain racist element that can never forgive or forget his blackness. She’s probably right, and I’m reminded of a column by Maureen Dowd last September when the president appeared before Congress to talk about health care. It was the night Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie” at Obama, and Dowd observed that she heard one more word that went unspoken: “Boy.”

I recall seeing a picture of a roadside sign – “Zoo has an African lion, White House has a lyin’ African” – and was angered by the coded message. I listen to the idiotic rants about Obama’s birth and wonder what planet these people live on. Surely it is not earth.

Reasonable people want this good and decent man to succeed – in the wake of the eight dark years of Bush. We elected him; he is our president. But I suspect that in addition to that Second Coming, he could come up with a cure for cancer and a plan for world disarmament and some people would still regard him as the black guy in the White House.

The right wing has done a number on him and just 13 months into the Obama administration, there must be a gnawing in the Democratic stomach, something hinting that the political makeup of the nation could change in November, and that the change could be painful and long lasting. Obama is the target of course, but truth be told, with some of his moves this past year, he has contributed to what could be the undoing this year of the Democratic majorities in Congress.

Questions.

Was there a good reason why Obama had to have a health care bill in his first year? Couldn’t he have waited 18 months? Maybe two years? Shouldn’t he have known that dramatic changes would scare a lot of honest people without axes to grind and that maybe they might have needed more time to understand what the changes were all about?

Remember how John Kerry frittered away the summer of 2004 before responding to the Swift Boat lies about him? Shouldn’t Obama have known that you don’t wait for slander to go away. You strike it and kill it in its tracks. Why didn’t he move quicker and more forcefully during the summer of 2009 to take on the Tea Partiers and their lies about health care?

Remember the guy who said he didn’t want government getting involved in his Medicare? Liberals snickered at his ignorance. But why didn’t the White House understand that that one man represented millions more with legitimate worries about medical care? Obama could have – should have – seized the moment, convened a Town Hall meeting, invited only older, more conservative people to ask questions and let them get answers from the president himself.

Why didn’t Obama make mincemeat out of Limbaugh when Limbaugh said he hoped Obama would fail? Doesn’t the nation fail when the president fails?

Why did Obama delight the political right by appointing a treasury secretary who hadn’t paid his taxes? Did he think this would go unnoticed?

Why did Rahm Emanuel use the expression “fucking retarded” to describe a plan he didn’t like? “Stupid” wasn’t good enough? Emanuel played right into Palin’s hands. Surely I wasn’t the only person to remember that her son Trig is one of 400,000 Americans with Down Syndrome. Their families, neighbors and friends constitute an awful lot of people to piss off.

Aside from the fact that Robert Gates is far more appealing than Donald Rumsfeld, could someone explain the difference between the wars with Bush as commander-in-chief and the wars with Obama as commander-in-chief?

How did the Obama Administration manage to schedule the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed for downtown New York without first conferring with the mayor, the police commissioner, the governor?

Fallout.

Scott Brown gets elected in Massachusetts and some Democrats are relieved because they still have 59 votes. So they need to get just one Republican senator to vote with them. Good luck to that. And, uh, fellows, among that group of 59 are such great Democratic stalwarts as Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter, plus several Blue Dogs. Enjoy your majority.

Kennedy of course is gone. His son Patrick is quitting the House.

Some polls suggest Barbara Boxer may have a rough re-election this year. I don’t recall the last time she had to struggle.

Republicans, sensing blood, are falling all over one another for the right to challenge Rep. John Hall.

Dodd, Bayh and Byron Dorgan are leaving the Senate. And Beau Biden, Joe’s son, decided not to run for his dad’s Delaware Senate seat, which once he could have had just by yelling “Gimme.”

Is anyone willing to bet on the future career of Harry Reid?

Who would have thought that one year after the Bush nightmare ended, there would appear in Minneapolis a huge billboard showing a picture of a smiling George W. Bush and the words “Miss me yet?” Miss Bush? That’s impossible, right?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but don’t push me.

That said, there’s something very strange occurring in the country these days. Prevarication Central at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee seems to be doing its Orwellian best to rewrite history. They want us to believe the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Virginia didn’t occur on George W. Bush’s watch. Clearly they want the nation to believe the lie that Two-Gun Bush was so tough that America’s enemies knew that to mess with him was to risk destruction. It’s also possible that since Bush did such a masterful job of wrecking the economy, the GOP would like history books – and voters in the next election – to distance him from the catastrophe of 9/11. One disaster is enough.

On three occasions in the last three months, prominent Republicans who have served in elective and appointive positions in government have suggested the impossible – that the attacks must have taken place late in the administration of Bill Clinton, which ended eight months earlier, or very early in the administration of Barak Obama, which didn’t begin for another seven and a half years. How this is possible is never explained.

If such patent nonsense had come from the mouths of three people outside politics I could accept that they simply didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s worse than that. This lie about the terror-less Bush administration was spread by three educated people who know better.

— “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama,” said Rudolph Giuliani during an interview by George Stephanopoulos last Friday on “Good Morning America.” Giuliani studied political science at Manhattan College and law at New York University. No domestic attacks under Bush? Has he forgotten the rubble of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001? Has he forgotten Richard Reid, the lunatic who tried to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoes? Has he forgotten the anthrax attacks that killed five people including Kathy Nguyen, 61, of the Bronx – one of his 7 million constituents?  

— “We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history,” said Mary Matalin in December. Matalin, 56, was an adviser to Vice President Cheney. She graduated from Western Illinois University, where she majored in political science, and from the Hofstra University law school. We “inherited” 9/11? Is she mad, comatose, or just a resident of another planet?

— “We did not have a terrorist attack during President Bush’s term,” said Dana Perino in November. Perino, 37, was Bush’s last press secretary. She is a graduate of the University of Southern Colorado, where she majored mass communications, two of whose requirements are getting the facts and telling the truth. She has a master’s degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois at Springfield. No attack under Bush? Nice try, but ask the families and friends of the 3,000 people murdered on Sept. 11 who was running the show. Ask the people aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami who subdued Reid. Ask the friends of Kathy Nguyen, who died miserably of inhalation anthrax just 50 days after Sept. 11.

You have to be pretty cynical about the intelligence of the American people to look into a television camera and spew the drivel that came from Giuliani, Matalin and Perino. Not that they were challenged by their interviewers – who just let these falsehoods slide.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Here comes Uncle Grump, the governor of New York, to tell you that those extra pounds you’ve gained over the years may have come from drinking Cokes, Dr. Pepper and all those coffee concoctions that come in bottles and seem to end in “cino.”

Watch out, because now that he has unveiled a $134 billion budget proposal – with a built-in deficit of $7.4 billion – Grump also has a plan to generate $465 million in new taxes. Guess who pays.

Governor Paterson’s idea is a new play of an old theme. The state needs cash. So he describes a particular product, usually a popular one – this time it’s sugary soft drinks, but on occasion it has been cigarettes – as dangerously unhealthy. Government to the rescue. So since the product in question isn’t beneficial to you, government taxes it but hopes that because you like it so much you’ll ignore the health warning, keep buying it and pay the additional tax on it.

The insincerity is staggering.

Paterson wants to tax sodas and some other sweetened drinks at the rate of a penny an ounce. A six-pack of Coke would cost you an additional 72 cents.

The Times-Union in Albany quoted State Health Commissioner Richard Daines praising the soda tax because it reduces obesity, saves on future health care costs, and pulls in that $465 million a year. Daines called it “a triple play.” Of course he forgot that he’s talking about a legal substance that millions of New Yorkers enjoy every day.

Question 1: If Paterson and Daines are so concerned about the public’s waistline, why don’t they insist that the penny-an-ounce tax be imposed on sugar sold by the pound at supermarkets? How about a tax on the syrup you like to pour on your pancakes at your favorite breakfast place. And you know that Irish coffee you enjoy on cold winter nights, or the rum and Cokes, rye and gingers and 7& 7s you occasionally sip before dinner out? Tax them, too. Whoa! Paterson isn’t that concerned about obesity. (In case you missed it, we elect a governor in 279 days.)

Question 2: Why are Paterson and Daines not asking that other products be taxed due to their ability to make people gain weight? How about a penny an ounce on butter? A penny an ounce on hot dogs made with lots of fat? A penny an ounce on the sale of cheese Danish? A penny an ounce on salt? And why doesn’t Grump call for an additional tax on wine, not because it makes you gain weight but because it’s a product with a label warning that women who consume alcohol while pregnant run the risk of having a baby with birth defects. You don’t see an alarm like that on a can of root beer.

Answer: Because taxing such things as butter would make a governor, whose popularity is already in question, even more politically vulnerable. One important rule of politics is that you can’t annoy too many constituencies at the same time.

For now, the talk is only about taxing soda. You know, the stuff that kids like and whose consumption ought to be controlled by their moms and dads, not the state. If Paterson is concerned about children gaining weight, he should direct Daines to launch a public awareness program and notify the public of its availability and leave parenting to parents.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I’ve never understood the logic of United Way. Operating through voluntary payroll deduction at several places I’ve worked, their pitch was that if I agreed to turn over, say, $10 a week to United Way, United Way would do me the honor of using my $500 a year to support various charitable endeavors.

It made no sense to me and I never participated. Why support the middle man when I can cut him out? United Way has rent, salaries and other administrative expenses to pay. Guess where that money comes from. United Way of Dutchess County, for example, spends about 8.2 percent of its revenues on administration, according to an online charity watchdog called charitynavigator.com. This means my $500 would really amount to $459 for people in need.

Since this column is ultimately about Haiti, I should note that Doctors Without Borders spends 1.1 percent on administrative expenses.

I acknowledge that the people who run United Way have to make a living. I acknowledge it, but I don’t support it. Instead of paying them to distribute my charitable donation, I can choose which causes I want to assist and contribute directly to them. This is not complicated; I do it every year.

Now comes word from the Huffington Post and MoveOn that as Americans contribute huge amounts for Haitian relief following the earthquake – and making many of those donations on plastic – the credit card companies are getting rich.

Huffington reports that such credit card contributions are subject to the same “administrative fee” that credit card companies collect from airlines, rental car companies, your local liquor shop, department stores and every other business we patronize with our plastic charge cards. In the case of charitable giving, the banks’ cut is 3 percent.

So here it is again, the uncharitable fee imposed for offering charity. Make that $500 donation on your credit card and understand that the recipient agency gets only $485. Through this 3 percent cut of the action, banks and credit card companies rake in an estimated $250 million a year.

If you devised a scheme to withhold 3 percent of your donation and chalk it up to your own administrative expenses, you’d be ridiculed by friends and shunned by strangers. But when banks do it, it looks great in their annual reports and makes for a great announcement at their shareholder meetings.

Now, during the Haitian catastrophe, Huffington reports that Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover are foregoing their 3 percent fees – until the end of February. As if to suggest that the rehabilitation of Port-au-Prince and the rest of the Haitian western half of the Island of Hispaniola will be complete in another 39 days.

I called Visa and was told by a customer service rep that donors can have the 3 percent fee waived just by asking. I wonder how people know about this. Then I called Visa’s public relations office to ask about this, and they sent me a copy of a press release in which Visa essentially congratulates itself for donating $200,000 for Haitian relief. Not exactly the question I’d asked.

Remember your checkbook?

A modest proposal: If you want to help the Haitian people, leave your plastic in your wallet. Instead, write a personal check to the charity of your choice and know that your donation – $500, $50, or $5 – remains intact.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com