Don's Tuesday Column

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/12/2018

                             On the role of district attorneys

We were fortunate to have had two commendable, qualified candidates for District Attorney, Carolyn Walker and Matthew Rogers, who handily won. It may now be passé to say “The best man won” when the runner up was a woman and when so many women are running in, and winning, races up and down the ticket throughout the American political landscape. It’s not at all appropriate for Democrats to peddle their “Republicans hate women” trope when so many principled, accomplished Republican women with conservative leanings are successful.

We’ve seen in our own county how the complicated—by state foolishness, by legal limitations, by court rulings and by the reality of limited jail space—role of District Attorney can be a boon or bane to the safety of our citizens. Perhaps a full accounting and unvarnished report on the Rancho Tehama massacre will shed light on what, if anything, could have been done differently, what local decisions were handcuffed, so to speak, by courts and state policies, such that we can confidently say it won’t happen again. Changes (to be) made may do just that.

However, I saw in California’s primary vote last week some troubling activity (ref: “Soros-backed California county prosecutors fail in 3 races” in Friday’s Daily News, AP). One of the world’s wealthiest leftist/socialist activists, George Soros, attempted to financially pave the way to victory for district attorney candidates of major counties that adhere to his brand of internationalist radicalism. I’ll set aside my aversion to assigning nefarious motives to influential, secretive players when we have real political candidates using funds from someone committed to destroying so much of what America is and stands for.

That doesn’t diminish the perfidy of “billionaire philanthropist” Soros using his ill-gotten lucre (through hedge fund and currency manipulation) to put in place county prosecutors who will use their offices—and taxpayers’ nearly-bottomless resources—to further radical agendas. The AP’s sanitized take emphasized the effort “to elect reform-minded candidates sympathetic to reducing mass incarceration and prosecuting shootings by police.”

First, note the journalistic trick of using (or in this case, not using) “scare quotes” to prejudice words or phrases that are meant to be questionable, debatable or partisan. In other words, it should have been written “mass incarceration” to note that it is a highly questionable, even just plain propaganda-driven, term used to connote a fallacious concept. It’s typically used by “criminal justice reformers.” They want minorities arrested, tried and convicted at rates commensurate with population ratios, not actual proportions of crimes committed by, say, black or Hispanic offenders.

Translation: Minority law-breakers ought not be put in prison if doing so creates a “disparate impact” of high rates of incarceration. So, if blacks are 12 percent of the population, they should not constitute more than 12 percent of inmates; such is the illogic of the racial justice warriors, many of whom rarely encounter the ravages of crimes by minorities. They live on campuses, in gated communities or well-off suburbs and ex-urbs.

They are literally oblivious to the facts of criminality and recidivism due, not to poverty alone, but due to fatherless homes, and urban gangs providing the substitute for said absentee fathers. Include politicians, civic leaders and school systems that refuse to risk criticism from the activists by stating what you just read. It never crosses their minds that Asian and Jewish youth commit less crime per capita; stable, strong family structure reduces crime whenever applied.

If anything, many of America’s cities and counties are “under incarcerating” due to wrong-headed and soft-hearted—perhaps well intentioned—laws and policies like what we suffer under in California, with such syrupy, phony names like “Safe Schools and Communities Act.” The sick joke of AB 109 needs no elaboration or statistical analysis; people have died, lost belongings and health at the hands of convicts forced back onto the streets through release programs promising rehabilitation and judicious application but delivering property and personal crime waves.

Then you have the corollary crusade to “prosecute shootings by police.” That simply translates to making it so legally dangerous to law enforcement—out there risking their lives for us—to use lethal force against violent scofflaws that they simply avoid doing what’s necessary to protect law-abiding people.

I’ll never forget reading about two meetings in the basement of a Washington, DC, church under Obama’s DOJ. In one room, moms, grandmothers and working residents were addressed by, and pleading with, local police representatives that they, the law-abiding innocent civilians, needed cops to put pressure on the miscreant youth hanging around corners. The harassment, drug dealing and petty crime flowing from such “yoots” was avoidable with tougher policing. They wanted those most likely to commit crimes to get the message: leave, get a job.

In another room were lawyers from Obama’s Justice Department who, together with “the usual suspects” (in this case ACLU and anti-cop types) were busy encouraging local “activists” (read: cop-hating BLM, and self-appointed voices of the people) to use protest, outrage and lawsuits to fight the very officers that the people in the first meeting were pleading with for protection.

Other Soros crusades (showing why his millions supported Hillary and other vote fraud apologists) are 1) to fight every effort to clean up voter rolls and implement voter ID; 2) to maximize legal immigration, facilitate de facto illegal immigration and reduce or eliminate national borders and impediments to endless migration. That’s why his major vehicle for “fundamental transformation,” of America and other countries, is his “Open Society” foundation. Overlords to tell us how to think, live.