If pork deters terror, al-Qaida is finished

NH Sunday News ^ | 4/13/03 | Jack Kenny

[RJCogburn]

COLLEGE BASKETBALL'S "March Madness" has finally ended, meaning it is nearly mid-April. The snow-covered baseball season is already two weeks old and the NCAA men's hockey tournament, called the "Frozen Four," ended just last night.

I'm afraid I'm not much of a hockey fan. I had thought the Frozen Four was the New Hampshire congressional delegation.

The delegation was unanimous in its approval of President Bush's supplementary spending requests for Operation Iraqi Freedom or whatever we're calling Bush War II these days.

It's surprising, really, that the President even bothers to specify the amount when he asks Congress for additional spending authority. Considering the kind of blank check the kennel-raised Congress critters signed when they "authorized" His Majesty to go to war last fall (in the "OK by Us, We Guess" resolution), they might have just passed the following:

"The President is hereby authorized to spend as much as shall please the President to spend, for whatever purpose seemeth good to the President to spend it on." That's pretty much the way the Imperial Presidency has operated since FDR invented it in '33.

Now in authorizing the spending of an additional $80 billion or so on the war, the Senate couldn't resist dancing to that old tune, "The Pork Barrel Polka." As the late Lawrence Welk used to say "Uh won annuh two annuh . . .

Roll the pork barrels, we'll have pork barrels o' fun. Roll the pork barrels, we'll shovel pork by the ton.

In various amendments attached to the war bill, the Senate voted to enhance our security in ways most of us never imagined before. There was, for example, a $10 million appropriation for, as the New York Times put it, "a research station at the South Pole that had had a hard winter."

Well, we've all had a hard winter, but I didn't know the South Pole ever had any other kind.

Then there was the $3.3 million item to fix a leaky dam in Vermont. Well, I guess a leaky dam could be a target for terrorists looking to contaminate ground water or something. But that would be redundant. We have people in our own government contaminating our ground water by requiring a certain additive in our gasoline. They're in something called the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thanks to this bit of emergency legislation, the Congress critters will be able to spend more money to send notices of their town meetings to their constituents. That should help the war effort, by golly.

At least one distinguished military veteran in the U.S. Senate was fed up at what went on under the guise of national defense.

"I was really appalled," said Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona. "Here, in the name of fighting the war in Iraq, they loaded up the bill with pork-barrel spending. I mean I didn't realize al-Qaida had reached all the way to the South Pole, but it's an example of a process that's simply out of control."

Whoa! Hold on, Honest John. Isn't supposed to be an article of faith in Washington that that al-Qaida's reach is universal? ("They're everywhere! They're everywhere!") So how does McCain presume to know where they're not?

Attorney Generalissimo John Ashcroft might want to have Sen. McCain arrested and held for questioning as a "material witness." Can you detain a United States senator indefinitely without charges? McCain has been through that before, of course, when he was fighting for freedom in Vietnam.

Besides, why overlook the South Pole as a potential target for terrorists? It's possible some fanatical hijackers will fly their planes right into the South Pole and destabilize the whole world, or at least the Southern Hemisphere.

And our wartime President, though he may seem preoccupied with Iraq, has not forgotten our amigos to the south. Tucked away in the war appropriations bill is a White House request for $104 billion to support anti-narcotics efforts in Colombia. Terrorists, after all, wreak tremendous havoc when they're "straight." Can you imagine the damage that might be caused by terrorists on drugs?

Meanwhile both the White House and congressional Republicans are trying to make permanent the sweeping new federal powers in the USA PATRIOT Act that were passed as a temporary measure in 2001, right after the terrorist attacks of September 11. That includes the authority federal agents have to go snooping into who is borrowing and buying what reading materials at public libraries and book stores.

Meanwhile, our good neighbor, U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont, is sponsoring the Freedom to Read Protection Act to defend a right we used to think was secured by the First Amendment. It will be interesting to see if any of our delegation — the Frozen Four — thaws out enough to support it.

Happy birthday, Thomas Jefferson.

[RJCogburn]

a $10 million appropriation for, as the New York Times put it, "a research station at the South Pole that had had a hard winter."

Well, we've all had a hard winter, but I didn't know the South Pole ever had any other kind.

Hard NH winter bump.

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