Whatever readers might have thought of the mind of the late William Loeb, the legendary publisher of New Hampshire’s statewide daily, the Union Leader, at least Loeb’s mind was his own and his words reflected his thoughts faithfully, according to whatever premise he was following.
Not so with the current publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, whose editorials are no less a rant, but whose rants are not his own. For Joseph W. McQuaid has turned the once independent Union Leader into the Daily Echo of the Republican National Committee.
No hack writing for Pravda, no acolyte of Chairman Mao ever hewed more slavishly to the party line than does the RNC’s Comrade Joe. In taking Senator Rand Paul to task for blaming the Middle East mess (ISIS and all the jihadis and the disappearing of the American-trained and -equipped Iraqi forces) on former President George W. Bush and the Republican “hawks,” McQuaid accused the Kentucky senator and 2016 presidential candidate of perpetuating the “loony isolationism” of his father, former Texas congressman and GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul. Down the Orwellian “memory hole” has gone the “loony isolationism” of the Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News of the early 1990s when the New Hampshire daily firmly opposed the Gulf War, waged by President George H.W. Bush to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
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That was when the Union Leader publisher and his editorial page unabashedly supported the insurgent presidential candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose “loony isolationism” had appeared in columns regularly in the Union Leader. So opposing a war against Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was sound foreign policy, but to oppose a war based on Saddam’s imagined possession of “weapons of mass destruction” was “loony isolationism.” Got that?
As an example of the elder Paul’s alleged looniness, McQuaid cited the Texas congressman’s contention that the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001 were payback for America’s decades of meddling in the Middle East. The publisher turns a blind eye to the fact that the United States had been inflicting economic privation on Iraq with a cruel embargo and had been bombing the country regularly for a dozen years prior to 9/11, including President Bill Clinton’s impeachment eve bombing of Iraq to change the subject of political discourse in December 1998. The CIA, not known for its practice or advocacy of “loony isolationism,” has a term for the retaliation that follows our deadly imposition of economic and military warfare on the people of the Middle East. It’s called “blowback.” Republicans who refuse to acknowledge that are less “hawks” than ostriches with their heads buried in the Middle East sand.
In what he no doubt thought was a clever putdown and an ultimate insult, publisher McQuaid suggested Senator Paul run for president in the Democratic primary, competing with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton, like the Union Leader and most of Congress, supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It took a long time, but she finally admitted she “got Iraq wrong.” (What she has ever got right remains a mystery.) The New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News have never made such an admission. The sad truth is the editorial page of the state’s largest daily and its publisher’s signed front-page editorials are less honest and forthcoming than the notoriously deceitful and two-faced Hillary Clinton.
The publisher of the Union Leader has never shown any recognition or appreciation of the difference between journalism and ventriloquism. The Edgar Bergens of the Republican Party come and go. But readers of the New Hampshire Union Leader always know where to find the Granite State’s Mortimer Snerd. (Snerd was a slow-witted character created by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen for his act.)
