My August 2006 Letters to the Editor in favor of Carol Shea Porter

Timothy Horrigan © 2006: commentary written October 30, 2006

This is a letter which I wrote on October 23, 2006 in support of Carol Shea Porter, Democratic candidate for the New Hampshire First Congressional District seat. She is running against Republican incumbent Jeb Bradley. It has been published on October 30 in the Portsmouth Herald and will also doubtless appear in other papers. (I used a service which broadcasts Letters to the Editor to daily and weekly papers throughout the Congressional District, so I don't know exactly where it ended up, and in some cases papers do not contact letter-writers in advance.)

To the Editors:

Jeb Bradley has adopted a cut and run strategy this election season: he has refused to engage in a constructive dialog with the people of the First Congressional District. The media for its part has imposed a news blackout on Democratic challenger Carol Shea-Porter's campaign.

Bradley has made three basic smears against Shea-Porter (all ripped out of Karl Rove's playbook.) The first charge is that Shea-Porter is a “liberal” who is “out of the mainstream”: however, if she is out of the mainstream, then just about all of us aside from the last few remaining Bush loyalists must be out of the mainstream. The second charge is that she is “inconsistent” on the issue of defense. However, she is only inconsistent if you believe (as Bradley seems to) that supporting our troops means that we have to continue the pointless war in Iraq and that we have to let our military be exploited as a cash cow for corrupt multinational corporations such as Halliburton.

Finally, Bradley states that Shea-Porter wants to raise taxes. Bradley ignores the sad truth that existing tax revenues are not sufficient to meet even budgeted Federal spending (let alone the huge cost of the Iraq war, which is “off-budget.”) There are only two ways to pay for this spending: taxation or borrowing. The Bush Administration has chosen the borrowing route, which undermines the integrity of our economy and puts us at the mercy of foreign lenders. If Bradley supports President Bush's wasteful spending, he needs to explain how we are ever going to pay for it: Shea-Porter has a solid plan for getting our government back on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Sincerely,

Timothy Horrigan
email: Timothy.Horrigan@alumni.usc.edu
address: 7A Faculty Road; Durham, NH 03824
phone: 603-868-3342



See also:

Extra![November 27, 2008]  I also wrote a letter about Carol Shea-Porter in late November 2008, defending her side of a ruckus her supporters (e.g., myself) got into during her 2008 re-election campaign with the CEO of a local high-tech company called Turbocam LLC. Foster's Daily Democrat headlined it "There will be signs two years from now, too" — and it can be found at the following URL:


The Forgotten Liars by Timothy Horrigan