NH Union Leader and Sunday News

Editorials - October 7, 2001

Good for Mr. Maiola!: Gregg’s man gives boot to peaceniks

THE CONCORD newspaper was in high dudgeon last week because the chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg told some so-called “peace activists” in Concord just where they could head in with their detestable petitions protesting the nation’s pursuit of the terrorist killers of more than 6,000 Americans.

Joel Maiola was actually “rude” to the New Hampshire Peace Action members, the paper complained. He didn’t even invite them to sit down, the paper huffed, as they lectured him on how it was really America’s fault that the terrorists killed all those American men, women, and children.

Incidentally, the leftwing Concord paper did this not just in an editorial whine but also in one of its “news stories” that, if slanted any further, would have fallen over on itself.

This Peace Action group had issued a similar statement within 48 hours of the attacks on America.

“When the rescue effort is finished, the survivors have recovered, and the dead have been buried, difficult and painful questions will remain about how anyone could have felt enough hatred and rage to commit such unspeakable crimes,” wrote the group on Sept. 13.

Note how these people always have to find an excuse for our enemies. “Part of the answer most likely lies in the painful fact that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed shortly before his death, the United States has become ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’” (And some still wonder why New Hampshire was so reluctant for so long to put King’s name to our Civil Rights Day?)

In response to all this, Gregg aide Maiola was said to have been “rude” and “hostile.” The Concord paper and its peacenik pals didn’t like his “tone.” He told them, in effect, they should be ashamed of themselves, as well they should. How rude of them to besmirch the memories of the lost and rub even rawer the emotions of the living, including many from New Hampshire and New England, with their unfeeling and absurd claims!

What plainly frosted the Concord sheet was that neither the protesters’ complaints nor its own shamefully slanted work fazed either Maiola or his boss. Maiola was “unrepentant” in the paper’s view and Gregg was an “aloof” senator with an “imperious air” that has left him out of touch with the voters.

On the contrary, the tin ear of the Concord paper could not hear the cheers that Gregg’s staff chief’s response no doubt received from most Granite Staters who heard or read of it. As for the peaceniks’ encounter with young Mr. Maiola, they should consider themselves luckier than their spiritual predecessor, the late U.S. Sen. Charles Tobey.

A hidebound isolationist, Tobey had opposed America’s efforts to rearm itself and help Europe right up until the day this nation was last sucker-punched, at Pearl Harbor. One could say he was treated more than rudely on the day one New Hampshire constituent walked right up to the senator in front of the Temple post office and decked him. And SHE was also unrepentant.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001