February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Peter King confounds.
He is a conservative Republican when it comes to most domestic issues, but ranks Bill Clinton as one of his closest political friends.
King backed John McCain for the GOP nomination in 2000 even after ridiculing McCain’s stance on campaign finance reform.
He was one of the first politicians to use the words “tone deaf” in describing then candidate George W. Bush’s political style.
He voted against impeaching President Bill Clinton.
He was for years dogged by charges that he was soft on terrorism because he would not join the chorus of condemnation of the IRA.
He is today one of the most vociferous members of Congress when it comes to backing President’s Bush’s war against terrorism anywhere in the world where it rears its head.
He was once accused of having blood on his hands by a British ambassador to Washington because of his refusal to disown the IRA’s campaign.
Now his hands are stained green as he holds sway over a mountainous wad of federal anti-terror dollars from his perch atop the House Committee on Homeland Security.
While politicians are usually lauded for their willingness to shoot from the hip, Pete King has taken his rhetorical firepower to a new level.
He shoots from both, usually on full automatic.
Sometimes he hits his own foot.
Yet, unlike many legislators, King has so far managed to avoid being hopelessly hobbled by a seeming reliance on political chutzpah over starchy predictability, or unremitting consistency.
Quite the contrary.
“He says and means what he says — a rare trait in Washington,” is New York Newsday’s view of King.
And there’s this from the New York Daily News: “Straight talk is King’s strength. He is the one congressman with his head on straight and his patriotism intact.”
Long Islander King, now in his seventh term as a congressman representing New York’s 3rd Congressional District, is seen as happily plowing his zigzag furrow to what many suspect is a moment when he will launch himself towards the U.S. Senate, a cabinet posting, the State House, or maybe even a veep slot on a future GOP ticket.
No matter what it turns out to be, King will continue to stand out — in the crowd, and from it.
It’s what he does best.
And it’s what he did on the back of flatbed truck on a windswept Manhattan street back in the days when Capitol Hill seemed as remote a prospect than Belfast’s Black Mountain.
It was March of 1989 and then-Nassau County Comptroller King was valiantly keeping up the GOP’s end outside the offices of the New York Times.
King was surrounded by Democrats, including the legendary Paul O’Dwyer, and was piling on his mostly unwitting party’s share of opprobrium as a result of the paper’s failure to even mention the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane.
During the 1980s, Comptroller King, son of Irish immigrant Democrats, more often than not found himself alone in the company of Democrats, lots of them, when the event was devoted to Northern Ireland.
But he was an easy fit. And he didn’t have to rely on anyone for his cue.
If anything, he was often the leading authority in the room having gone to Northern Ireland to learn of the situation at particularly close hand.
Then Newsday reporter Jim Mulvaney was witness to King’s early encounters in Belfast with the protagonists, most notably the leaders of militant loyalism.
Never stepping back from his support of Sinn F