Posted on 03/30/2003 5:55:03 AM PST by NativeNewYorker
ITHACA, N.Y., March 29 — The other night was Joan Baez, and tonight there will be gay and lesbian choruses. But Friday night the main feature at this small city's majestic State Theater was a congressman in the prerequisite gray suit, standing alone at a lectern and talking about geopolitics, oil and war.
He wowed them.
He said the war against Iraq was wrong, illegal, a tragedy. He said President Bush had deceived people and was stifling dissent rather than embracing diplomacy. He said that he had explored the prospect of impeachment, but that the time was not right, at least not yet.
And he elicited another round of applause by urging his receptive listeners — Ithaca being a liberal outpost in a rural and generally conservative setting — to continue opposing the war. "We should speak out on this tragedy on every possible occasion that we have," said their congressman, Maurice D. Hinchey.
Mr. Hinchey is not the only member of Congress to oppose the war, of course. When 296 representatives voted in October to authorize the president to use the military to fight "the continuing threat" of Iraq, 133 members voted against the measure.
But in these first days, with Americans risking and sometimes losing their lives on foreign soil, this compact Democrat with the impressive white mane is among the very few representatives who have refused to grant the war a grace period. A 64-year-old Navy veteran, he has all but dared people to call him unpatriotic.
Critics have accepted his dare, seizing on a recent letter to supporters in which he wrote in part that "we are engaging in what will come to be seen as a massacre in Iraq on the basis of the `Bush Doctrine' of pre-emption." Mr. Hinchey later posted a tempered statement on his Web site, omitting "massacre" and expressing support for the troops, but critics still accused him of being loose-lipped, and worse; The New York Post, for example, questioned his "fitness for Congress."
But Mr. Hinchey said Friday night that he would not retract his use of the word "massacre" because he had meant it in the conditional. If the United States had used the "shock and awe" bombardment of Baghdad, he said, then many civilians might have died — leading others to view it as a massacre. "I don't want my country seen by others that way," he said, winning more applause.
After a decade in Congress, Mr. Hinchey has little Republican opposition and no burning ambition for higher office. He seems content to fulfill the time-honored role of the questioning representative demanding that an administration's case for war be made. That is his right, he says.
Joel H. Silbey, a professor of American history at Cornell University, said war dissent in Congress dated at least to a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the war being waged against Mexico by the Polk administration. Usually, though, "the life of the dissenter in war is very hard," he said. "He's either ignored, or characterized as a kook, or comes under severe attack."
Mr. Hinchey had little fear of severe attack here, where antiwar stickers and signs are fashion accessories. He received a standing ovation from more than 200 constituents when he entered this recently renovated theater of glorious 1920's-era detail, where an American flag drooped beside the lectern and the multicolored flag of gay pride hung from the rafters above.
Barbara Mink, a former local legislator, told the audience she had been in this theater for the Joan Baez concert the other night, "probably with many of you." And here now, she said, your congressman: another person "fighting the good fight" against the Bush administration and the national media establishment.
Mr. Hinchey began by asking for a moment of silence — "and for those so inclined, prayer" — for the safe return of American soldiers. He reiterated his support for the troops. Then he started into his critical assessment of the war's origins, zeroing in on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in particular.
Most of the 14 people who stepped up to the microphones during the question-and-answer segment of this forum praised Mr. Hinchey for his antiwar stance. Some urged him to pursue impeachment, winning even more applause.
But one man, distinctive in his crisp blue blazer, asked whether Mr. Hinchey would renounce "shrill, irresponsible" language by retracting his "massacre" statement. The request prompted hisses from the audience and an explanation of conditional language by Mr. Hinchey.
The man did not identify himself as Paul Slobodian, a Republican from the town of Vestal who is thinking of challenging Mr. Hinchey in 2004. But that was his right.
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