| Let's get two things straight.
First off: every American citizen has a right to speak their mind on matters great and small. If a group of variously related military families, some of whom are from the first district, want a personal meeting with second district Congressman Paul Hodes so that they can shout at him without letting him get a word in edgewise, and then selectively edit a YouTube of it for a right-wing blog, God bless them. If they want to yell at him for voting to fund the troops instead of the president who will veto those funds, our Constitution gives them that right. And since the President has callously and recklessly decided to shoulder the burden of two wars, one of them an occupation, on an all-volunteer army, it is especially important to hear from military families at this time in our nation's history.
Secondly, if media such as the Concord Monitor and Union Leader are going to be invited to this clearly partisan and coordinated effort, they have a responsibility to provide some context other than mentioning them as military families. And perhaps a word or two about how current approval ratings for the President are at rock bottom levels largely because of Granite Staters' objections to the Iraq war.
Imagine if I were granted a personal meeting with Sununu based on the fact that I have an immediate family member who is now serving in the armed forces. How many words into the Union Leader article do you think you would get before you saw the words "liberal blogger"?
Here are some minor details left out of the articles on the meeting with Hodes:
Click on "There's more"... |
| As Laura mentioned earlier, one of the members of the meeting is Gail Giarusso. You may remember her as one of two women claiming without proof that they were being intimidated by Carol Shea-Porter because she had the audacity to call them back about their concerns.
Gail is an actively partisan Republican. A member of the Stratham Republican Town Committee, here she is claiming to the Washington Times days before the 2004 election that the Red Sox are part of a pro-Kerry conspiracy. And here she trumpeting many Republican positions besides the war in an LTE. More recently, she can be found accusing the Congress of emboldening the enemy.
Another person present at the meeting was Natalie Healy, whose son Dan was killed in Afghanistan. A now archived UL article preserved by Freepers sums up her mission well: Natalie Healy made a decision this summer after losing her son in war-torn Afghanistan.
"I can't go to those mountains and climb them and I can't shoot a gun," she said. "But I can do everything I can to make sure we stay the course, and if that means speaking out, then that's what I want to do." The article makes a strong case that Healy was positioning herself to be an anti-Cindy Sheehan. As she herself says of Sheehan's son:Healy said she doubted Sheehan's son, Casey, would support his mother's mission.
In fact, she planned on going to Crawford with Gerry Duncan (also at Hodes' meeting last Friday) to protest Cindy Sheehan back in 2005, but later decided against it. However, they both planned a rally at the statehouse in September of that year. That's on top of rallies in Exeter and Portsmouth and Maine, and an appearance on CNBC. And here she is being praised by the NY Sun for her efforts to counter Sheehan.
In addition to her organized pro-war activism, Ms. Healy was also the Republican candidate for State Senate in District 23, losing to Democrat Maggie Hassan. You may view her speaking on her candidacy at this YouTube, where she says the following (transcription mine): Shortly after his [Dan's] death, it became apparent that the left was using the grief of another Gold Star mother to undermine our war effort.
Yet no mention of any of this by the papers. Even when the Monitor itself published an LTE by Healy just days before the meeting with Hodes. I realize brevity is the soul of wit, as well as the power of good journalism. I'm not suggesting newspapers print background checks on everyone they quote. But a simple "Repubican state senate candidate" or "all the members, oddly, were from the first district" would have done wonders towards putting this "meeting" into proper context.
As I said before, every American has a right to free speech, a right protected by our men and women in uniform. But the media have an obligation to provide context to a story, and here, instead of doing that, appeared to be enablers to a well coordinated ambush by determined pro-war partisan Republicans. |
