Andrew Sylvia of Merrimack is the Organizer of Democracy For New Hampshire Souhegan Valley and the Registrar of Citizens Action For Southern New Hampshire. Andrew's commentary below is in response to an op-ed written by Representative Paul Mirski a few weeks ago in the Milford Cabinet. You can read the Mirski op-ed here. ~ed.
Beware of Paul Mirsky…
By Andrew Sylvia

I am writing in response to the near libelous letter by Representative Mirski in the June 2nd edition of the Milford Cabinet. I say that Mirski’s letter is almost libelous because a few questions need to be answered and a few of his statements need to be clarified before it can be determined whether Mirski’s statements are truly defamatory or whether he’s just a far right extremist exercising his first amendment rights through “lazy scholarship”.

Democracy For New Hampshire is 100% run by New Hampshire residents. Peter Glenshaw, DFNH’s leader who Mirski apparently believes lives in a “monastery” or a “lefty-left enclave”, actually is a resident of Lyme where he serves on the School Board. I consider myself fairly active in DFNH, yet I’ve only met Peter a handful of times. “How is that,” you ask? Let me explain.

Democracy For New Hampshire is a very diverse, growing and de-centralized organization. I’ve met DFNH members from Milford, Brookline, Hollis, Amherst, Merrimack, Nashua, Lebanon, Lyme, Goffstown, Manchester, Keene, Chesterfield, Winchester, Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter, New Boston, Concord, Canterbury, Kingston, Candia, Peterborough, Henniker and Swanzey, off the top of my head. I might be forgetting a few.

I’ve also met people who have worked on DFNH projects that run across the political gamut from Republican (former Nashua Senator Barbara Pressley), Libertarian (NHLP Communications Director Rich Tomasso) and Independent (DFNH Vice Chair and Fair Election Committee Chair Nancy Tobi) among the majority of the group which is Democratic.

In theory, we’re the state affiliate Democracy For America, the continuation of the Howard Dean campaign, but theory and practice are very different. Each one of DFNH’s local groups across the state is completely and utterly autonomous. Some of those local groups are gung ho for DFA’s initiatives, others such as the Seacoast Progressive Alliance or Citizens Action For Southern New Hampshire focus almost completely on issues related to their local areas. Yet when push comes to shove, they help each other however they can through their expertise and interests.

In contrast, Grover Norquist’s “Tax Pledge” is considered a “binding” document according to his website, which begs the question – is Norquist’s pledge truly a pledge or a contract? Many politicians have broken it, but apparently the only reason why Norquist hasn’t tried to sue these politicians is because he’d look like a bully against the people who finally followed their conscience and decided to listen to the needs of their constituents instead of lobbyists in Washington.

If the NH legislators who signed Norquist’s binding pledge were loyal to themselves and their constituents rather than the demands of Washington lobbyists, DFNH members probably wouldn’t be as adamantly opposed to them. Sure, most of us would still probably disagree with them and work against their dogmatic one sided views, but at least those views would be the views of New Hampshirites. Who knows? Maybe they can go towards Governor Thompson’s pledge or Mirski’s “Covered in Red Ants” pledge, or even better yet, follow their own consciences and the requests of their constituents.

If Mirski actually did present the falsehoods that I corrected above as fact rather than the opinion of an extremist “Lazy Scholar”, and that the views of that extremist lazy scholar would actually sway anyone else’s views, then DFNH actually could sue Mirski under precedent set by New York Times vs. Sullivan. However, I doubt they will. After all, we’re not a bunch of Norquists…