Longtime observer puts Stefanik among the 'ignobles'

Ugly hulk ruins efforts to improve South Street

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I started reading George Will’s column 50 years ago, when I was a young teenager working summers in Saranac Lake at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, the newspaper my parents owned.

I liked his erudite, argumentative writing style and liked to think about what I would say in response to his columns I didn’t agree with, which were frequent.

He’s 82 now, still writing for Washington Post Writers Group, still showing off his vocabulary and, when faced with a choice of whether to soften his language, still choosing not to.

His column earlier this week starts like this:

“On Saturday, the House voted 311-112 for $61 billion for Ukraine, with 112 ignoble House Republicans voting to condemn Ukraine to death, starved of such military basics as artillery shells.”

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about the sometimes-thoughtless but predictable protests of college students, was one of those 112 ignoble ones.

Again, with many of her other constituents, I ask: “What has happened to her?”

But the answer is obvious. Ambition has happened, and it has found satisfaction in her allegiance to Donald Trump. The only loss has been her integrity.

Some may argue she hasn’t changed, that a willingness to sell out her principles was present from the start. 

But although she showed signs early on of being an opportunist, only in the last few years has she become so committed to distortion and antagonism, using her position to seek out targets and subject them to unrelenting attacks.

Her latest victims are college students protesting Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and college presidents who dare defend the students’ right to free speech. Is it rude to ask what this has to do with her congressional district?

On her refusal to help Ukraine, meanwhile, she has been silent. Nothing on X, where she rants daily about college students in New York City and Boston. Not a word on her website, where most of the home page is taken up by headlines about Columbia University protests, such as “Daily Express US: Biden told to ‘pull Columbia’s funding and deport students’ by GOP chair Stefanik.”

Her hyperbole exceeds parody. As a Trump acolyte, she is pitch-perfect.

But none of it is funny for Ukrainians fighting for their homeland and their lives. Nor is it amusing for any American who thinks about the cost of bowing to Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.

A few years ago, I read Winston Churchill’s account of World War II in six volumes: “The Gathering Storm,” “Their Finest Hour,” “The Grand Alliance,” “The Hinge of Fate,” “Closing the Ring” and “Triumph and Tragedy.”

It was long but great, intimate and sweeping, with discussions of his prodigious drinking and work habits and details of battles in the unfolding war. Churchill makes one point repeatedly in the first book — that France by itself had a larger army than Germany through most of the 1930s, and that France and England together had numerous warnings of what was coming and opportunities to prevent it.

It’s impossible to know what will happen if we follow Stefanik’s and Trump’s wishes and allow Ukraine to fall to Putin. But here is what George Will has to say:

“Heroism is not required of Ukraine’s NATO and other allies, whose combined GDPs are 20 times that of Russia. The cost of losing, by ill-conceived parsimony, this proxy war with a barbarian power possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal would be steep.”

We rely on our political representatives for historical perspective as we keep busy with the everyday. But we can’t rely on Stefanik, because she is wearing the blinders of Trumpism.

Walks

If you live in Glens Falls, lovely walks can be found very close by, such as two we took this week, along the Feeder Canal and, for the first time this year, through Coles Woods.

The Feeder Canal trail has an openness and tranquility that lure lots of walkers.

Coles Woods is special in a different way, with the sun filtering through surrounding trees and, at this time of year, thousands of pine cones crunching underfoot.

Downtown

We like to stop into LARAC’s Lapham Gallery every time a new show is hung. The latest is “Mirror Master,” featuring artists Pennie Brantley and Robert Morgan, a married couple, which is up through May 15. Both are well-known and accomplished artists, whose works add a touch of surrealism, in Brantley’s case, and more than a touch in Morgan’s, to a mastery of realistic technique. On Friday, May 17, the two artists will come to town to give an artist talk at 5 p.m. in the gallery.

“Triumph” by Pennie Brantley

‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ by Robert Morgan

On a less pleasant note, how did the city of Glens Falls get into a position where it is pouring millions of dollars in state funding, along with local tax dollars, into revitalization of South Street, while this building that takes up half a block presents a wall of ugliness to the public? Can anything be done to force the owner, Chad Nims, to either sell the building or improve it? The Post-Star reported that Nims bought the building at 46-56 South Street in 2017 for $600,000. Now, the Chronicle reports, after deteriorating for seven years, it’s on the market for double the price — $1.2 million.

All the work being done to revitalize South Street is undermined by this ugly hulk.