Somebody in our high command let two former Navy SEALs die fighting off eighty radical Muslims. They fought bravely for seven hours and they could have been saved, but someone made a political decision that they should be left to die. Was that our commander-in-chief? Looks to me that it was, but soon we'll have a full-scale investigation to answer that forty-year-old question: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" This isn't what I started writing about for my weekly column but after watching our indignant president's arrogant performance at the press conference Monday, my blood was boiling.

Uh-oh. We're screwed
We know he's a political animal. All presidents are. A huge ego is necessary to even go after the job, but most maintain basic human values and decency while functioning in the Oval Office. Did President Obama? He was running for a second term and election day was six weeks away. He'd been bragging about killing Osama Bin Laden and putting al Qaida on the run. Then, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, an al Qaida group murdered an American Ambassador the president himself had appointed. Ambassador Stevens' body was photographed being dragged through the streets, and there are unconfirmed reports that it was degraded in other ways before and after death.
It can't be proven yet, but it's obvious to millions of Americans that President Obama made a political decision that it was bad for his campaign for al Qaida to draw American blood again on the anniversary of September 11th, and on his watch. So, he tried to make it seem like it was something other than a terrorist attack, and hoped to ride it out until after election day. With the cooperation of our lapdog Mainstream Media, who either believed or pretended to believe his lies, he did.
This writer is not foreign policy expert or a White House correspondent. I'm a retired history teacher, but I knew right away it wasn't a "demonstration" against a Youtube video. It was a full-scale terrorist attack by radical Muslims bent on killing Americans. People don't bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to demonstrations. So, when I watched as President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to the families of the slain Americans next to their coffins at the airport, I was enraged. When I watched UN Ambassador Susan Rice go around the Sunday morning talk shows, I knew she was lying too. Right away I got on my laptop and started typing to give vent to my anger. The next day, September 17th, I posted it on my web site and it ran in the newspapers the following Thursday, the 20th.
For weeks afterward, I had to listen to President Obama tell the same lie on several television programs and at the United Nations. I vented my increasing rage again in a web post September 25th, which ran as another column the following Thursday in various newspapers. I watched as the Mainstream Media jumped all over Mitt Romney for even commenting on the attack. I watched as CNN's Candy Crowley helped President Obama keep the lid on his lies during the second presidential debate which she moderated. Then I watched Romney wimp out on Benghazi in the third debate - and Obama cruised to victory.

Now, finally, it's unraveling. The Mainstream Media is being shamed into covering the emerging scandal they've studiously ignored for eight months. They know they can't ignore the testimony of the three, brave whistleblowers last week. Monday I watched their faces at the press conference as their hero embarrassed himself with his continued, arrogant stonewalling. They weren't going to be his lapdogs anymore, but he hasn't realized it yet.

The president also denied knowing anything about his Internal Revenue Service officials targeting conservative groups and pro-Israel Jewish groups for harassment until it was reported as a Friday-afternoon story three days before. I don't believe that, and, as I watched their faces during the press conference, it looked like those reporters didn't believe it either. They knew that history was about to repeat itself as members of the House of Representatives - controlled by the opposite party - will soon form up and ask the same question over and over: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" According to our Constitution, the House has sole power of impeachment.
The worst part of this, however, is the brave soldiers who died at their posts because someone twice gave the order for their rescuers to "stand down." Then there's Sean Smith, the State Department computer expert who died with Ambassador Stevens. His mother commented Sunday: "I want to wish Hillary a happy Mother's Day," she said. "She has her child. I don't have mine because of her."

By David F. Brochu
Turn on your television just about any time of day, any day of the week, and you will likely see an ad promoting retirement planning solutions. Most feature a handsome, fit and racially appropriate (for your area of the country) couple enjoying the good life, strolling lovingly arm in arm along the beach.
That this image could easily be confused with an ad for erectile dysfunction (ED) is ironic; however ED is a lot easier to treat than what really ails most retirees: planning dysfunction (PD).

Not many can remember when Main Street in Center Conway was a safe and pleasant place to walk. Even when I was a child, Canadians bound for Old Orchard Beach and teenagers intent on impressing their peers made it worth a pedestrian’s life to try to cross from the old post office to Frye’s Store. Today, it isn’t even Main Street anymore. Thanks to the obsession with emergency response, and the influx of people who don’t know one village from another, Center Conway merely borrows East Main Street from its bigger cousin to the west.
I didn’t miss the quiet days at “the Centre” by that much. Waiting at Frye’s for the bus to Conway Junior High School in 1961, my schoolmates and I sometimes stood in the shade of some of the same elms at the left and right of this picture. They were huge by then, but Dutch Elm disease had doomed them.
The photo here was taken no later than 1902, for the following spring the town hall — the second building from the right, here — was substantially enlarged. The same pre-1903 date might have been deduced from an exploded view by the absence of automobile tire tracks and the abundance of road apples in the street, uncrushed by motor vehicles. The rudimentary telephone poles, without crosstrees, suggest that the picture could not have been taken many years before that.
The sun shines nearly from the south, so it is late morning, and the trajectory of that midday sun implies that it is a somewhere near the summer solstice — and probably early July, judging by the bunting along the picket fence, at left, which can be detected in a magnified view. It is almost certainly a Sunday: a woman is sitting in a one-horse surrey in the yard of the Methodist Church, evidently waiting for the driver to climb up beside her. A couple is strolling away from the church, headed home for lunch, and two other people are walking ahead of them.
The lack of vehicles or people at either of the two competing stores adds further evidence of a Sunday photo. George Calhoun’s store sits just beyond the church, with Garland & Morrison’s store and post office two doors beyond that. Ira Garland, whose home also peeks into the picture at right, held the office of postmaster from 1896 until 1902, and his brother John served in the same capacity before and after him. Having the post office gave their store a distinct advantage, and one member or another of their family remained postmaster continuously from 1886 until 1908. Later they built a bigger home and store opposite the end of Mill Street.
Traffic is nonexistent, until the surrey starts for home, and a dog wanders languidly across the road in the distance. In the middle ground at left, a woman ambles in the photographer’s direction with a young child ahead of her wearing a white dress. Since this is around the time of the McKinley administration, it might be a boy in the dress.
Hugh McNorton lived in the house at far left, where the bunting decorates the fence. In his prime he had worked as a teamster, but by the time of this photo he was in his upper 70s. He, too, had served as postmaster, from 1861 until 1871 and again in the 1880s, always under Republican presidents, and somehow he retained the appointment during the nine months he spent in the Union army at the end of the war. He had lived in the house for nearly half a century, and would be carried out of it in 1905.
The crest of Pine Hill rises just above the cupola of Cyrus Mudgett’s barn, in the distance at dead center, and faintly visible beyond that is the brow of South Moat. Beyond there lay another world that village residents would have found alternately exciting and terrifying. By the time the child in the white dress saw the last of Earth, that world would engulf the serene little village with the broad, quiet street and the sauntering citizens.

William Marvel lives in South Conway.