Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/12/2014

Boat ramp gripe; Coulter review

Returning to the (relative) flat lands of Bend had the major benefit of restoring Internet service, complete with hundreds of eminently delete-able emails, news and analysis of recent events, and the “epageflip” version of the Daily News. While skimming weeks of issues, “exhibit A” for the State of Jefferson appeared in Friday’s edition: “Red Bluff City Council delays boat launch project approval…pending further review of the project’s environmental impact.

“At its meeting Tuesday, council members were presented with comments from state agencies that recommended further explanation of how certain aspects of the proposed project would affect air quality, biological and cultural resources, recreation and transportation.” Really? Is this what the highest taxes, the largest debt, the most bureaucrats, regulators and rules in America gets a little town whose primary economic lifeblood now runs unproductively to the sea? They (enviros, agencies and judges) are 100 percent responsible for the fact that a prime boating location—that for decades provided our citizens easy local access to the Sacramento River and our lake—sits high and dry for going on 3 years.

It is nothing short of ludicrous to suggest that a replacement boat ramp/launch will have any measurable affect on “air quality.” Am I missing something? Let’s add it up: The affect on recreation will simply be to return a portion of the recreation taken from Red Bluff by the loss of the lake. The affect on transportation will be absolutely irrelevant; fewer cars will use the new launch than when Lake Red Bluff was a summer-long draw.

Then there apparently are “biological and cultural resources” affected. Exactly how? Is some plant that didn’t exist when water covered its little spot of earth going to get displaced? Do we have to account for the possibility that some indeterminate number of fish will get caught that wouldn’t without the boat launch? Finally, is some cubicle-dwelling bean-counter getting paid to mandate that we account for how some indecipherable “cultural resources” will be affected?

To you literary loudmouths hurling your insults and completely made-up fantasies of doom, gloom and devastation that you suggest will accompany severing political and governmental ties to the behemoth of overreaching mendacity known as Sacramento—this one little issue says it all. Either you want the union/Democrat-dominated “Emerald City” to issue such ridiculous orders to jump (we get to say, “how high?”), and you want the majority to knuckle under and go along with this nonsense, or admit the Jefferson advocates have a legitimate beef with California. By the way, I know all too well that the Army Corps of Engineers holds federal agency approval in non-California hands and would remain a “gate keeper” to this project, the State of Jefferson notwithstanding; however, a conservative Republican president could, with orders from the top, mandate less restrictive, less intrusive cooperation with towns like Red Bluff.

Campsite or lakeside reading can range from FBI thrillers by Catherine Coulter, action/terrorist fair by Brad Thor or Ken Follet—page-turning fiction—to book length political fare not usually indulged at home. That genre just doesn’t get any better than books by conservative firebrand Ann Coulter. Bend’s libraries let you check out “e-books” that remain on your device for listening a set period of time before they expire. Not a bad way to enjoy “reading” while actually watching the beauty of nature.

So, while Ann Coulter’s “How to Talk to a Liberal (If you must),”—a compilation of her columns from the late 90s to 2005—provided page-turning of its own, it was her “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America” (2011) that burned its way through my ears. Coulter described “Demonic” to CBS News anchor Jeff Glor: “… the left’s image-based arguments, combined with their frequent adoption of utterly contradictory positions, it turns out, are classic earmarks of mob mentality. Then, of course, there are the frequent explosions of violence from the left, when mob psychology leads to something more frightening than confusing, and becomes an actual, literal mob.” (from Wikipedia)

I’ll take the liberty of sharing her publisher’s book description: “Democrats have a history that consists of pandering to mobs, time and again, while Republicans, heirs to the American Revolution, have regularly stood for peaceable order. Hoping to muddy this horrifying truth, liberals slanderously accuse conservatives of their own crimes—assassination plots, conspiracy theorizing, political violence, embrace of the Ku Klux Klan. Coulter shows that the truth is the opposite: Political violence—mob violence—is always a Democratic affair.”

The work of French sociologist and social psychologist Gustave Le Bon informed her tour de force of mobs from the French Revolution—described in gruesome, bloody, body-mutilating detail from contemporary accounts—to Southern lynch mobs, to violent antiwar mobs, to the mobs race-rioting in cities in the 60s, to “Bush-deranged” mobs, to the anti-capitalist mobs that show up and destroy property at economic forums. Her contentions and descriptions, published in 2011, were borne out with exclamation points as the leftist “Occupy Wall Street” movement delivered destruction, violence and lawlessness to many cities.

The Tea Party protests and the tens of thousands of pro-life demonstrators are not “mobs”; they are simply peaceably assembling to petition for redress of legitimate grievances. Overreaching government and voracious overtaxing in the Tea Party’s view; the slaughter of millions of innocent pre-born children in the pro-life movement’s view.