Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   10/10/2017

Gun violence; island grids, graft

Re: The massacre in Las Vegas, and the hurricane-spawned destruction of Puerto Rico. The mass murderer was diabolical and meticulous in his well-planned carnage; tens of thousands of concert-goers presented the kind of soft target preferred by Islamic terrorists (no such connection has yet surfaced). The stories of heroism uplift us even as the senselessness of the crime almost induce fatalistic resignation over the futility of stopping it.

Cheap and disingenuous anti-gun talking points flew over the airwaves and out of politicians’ mouths before blood dried, the bodies removed and the killer’s weapon’s collected. Fully automatic machine guns have been illegal without special permit; Obama’s ATF gave the ok for “bump stock” modifications to turn semi-auto into fully automatic guns. None of the proposed gun laws would have kept this killer from his carnage. 58 dead innocents are dwarfed by any year’s worth of gun-restricted Chicago violence. It’s all liberal, gun-grabbing hypocrisy.

Nancy Pelosi proclaimed her desire for a “slippery slope” of anti-gun laws and Australian-style forced “buy back” confiscation. The NRA rightly says that all ATF has to do is reverse its rules on “bump stock” devices. They were only designed to allow handicapped shooters access to armed self defense. Moreover, assertions of America’s widespread gun violence skirts the glaring discrepancy of urban shootings by criminals, heeding no existing restrictions, compared to rural parts of those same states that have no more homicides by firearms than, say, Canada or Europe.

In Puerto Rico’s situation, the Trump-hating-and-deranged leftist news media failed to offset, with easily available facts, their hollow attempts to make it into his “Katrina” of failed federal response. The island suffered from numerous problems of its own making: Infrastructure—roads and power grids—was shortchanged by budgets devoted to public sector benefits, union wage structure and graft. Minimum wage mandates reduced employment, creating poverty, as they do wherever applied. Corporations fled the island when favorable tax policy changed over Democrat-inspired complaints about supposed “tax giveaways.”

Manipulated public outrage over the U.S. Navy’s port on the island of Viequas drove the Navy out of Puerto Rico, taking its $300 million contribution to the economy with it. 80 percent of the island’s truck drivers didn’t show up to transport relief supplies from central hubs.

Liberalism and massive public debt, not President Donald Trump, failed Puerto Rico long before hurricane landfall. Look up, “Trouble on Welfare Island; Overbearing government and the welfare state are hurting the United States' poorest citizens,” at The Economist.

Correcting the Vietnam War record is essential; I’ll not leave that worthy effort until it is finished because much of the last 40+ years of Democrat and leftist anti-American propaganda derives from that failed war. It’s been said that victory has many fathers while failure and defeat are orphans. American military blunders and strategic mistakes wasted years of what could have been accomplished before 1969. The war’s prosecution could have been vigorously maintained by both Presidents Johnson and Nixon for the purpose of first, defeating the North Vietnamese Army and the civilian infrastructure supporting it, and second, keeping the South Vietnamese supplied with promised replacement equipment and arms as well as American bombing support.

For now, look up “Notes on the Ken Burns version,” by Scott Johnson, and “Be skeptical of Ken Burn’s documentary,” by Terry Garlock. Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War” is solid research.

At numerous times during our summer travels, the exclamation, “It’s a trap!” (as in “tourist trap”) became a short laugh line. Watching some of my recorded shows, I found no shortage of the phrase in, for instance, episodes of “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica.” In “Batman,” Robin shouted, “Holy rat-in-a-trap, Batman!” over one of Joker’s machinations.

I was chagrined to find Mr. Minch taking the bait and getting caught in a trap of his own making by “doubling down” in responding to simple statements of my position against, and polling on, the contentious issue of athletes protesting the national anthem by sitting or kneeling. Attentive readers may have learned three things: 1) Minch heeds not the one time expressed desire of the editor that columnists refrain from attacking other columnists—his jibes at “the Tuesday columnist” have appeared in many of his pieces, as well as at other writers; 2) He approves of the protests against the national anthem; 3) He doesn’t hesitate to use made up quotes to mischaracterize what was plainly stated in my columns.

This is not an attack; defending myself is within the bounds of propriety. I’ll not repeat his snide, malicious description of my writing from last Friday’s “I say.” What must be affirmed is that it’s contemptible to make up, out of whole cloth, a statement that I in fact have not made. Mr. Minch wrote, “Don stated that the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Vietnam War was slanted by suggesting it was not a ‘good war’ and that 58,000 dead U.S. (sic) serviceman was too high a price to pay, plus, we should have pulled out of that war long before we did.”

I reread every relevant paragraph from my summer columns and found no such “statement.” That’s a fabrication of someone else’s words; it is especially reprehensible when my columns are readily available and posted in Daily News archives and, on every Tuesday, at DonPolson.blogspot.com. Mr. Minch, please retract your accusation on the basis of inaccuracy; it should be below the standards for even a local writer to make such a quote up. If Mr. Minch disputes Mr. Lewis Sorley’s quotes and authoritative accounts of the 1968 to 1975 period of the Vietnam War, ask me for his sources and I will provide them. They’re irrefutable.