Don's Tuesday Column

               THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   2/29/2019

        Shutdown drama; totalitarian left

On Friday, President Trump announced a “deal” to reopen the parts of government idled by the shutdown. It appears that, for about 3 weeks, attempts will be made to negotiate the improvement of Southern border security with barriers or walls. That such physical impediments to illegal entry are essential, to stem the flow of alien migrants, drugs, human trafficking and foreigners with malign intent, is as obvious as the phrase “no brainer” could suggest.

Commentary, analysis, spin and partisan scoring abounds, but I see the most shameful, irresponsible abuse of governing leverage—by Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi—that has ever in my adult lifetime been perpetrated. It’s comparable to, on the one hand, the air traffic controllers’ strike under President Reagan, effectively solved when he boldly fired striking workers. It’s also similar to the recently settled teachers’ strike in Los Angeles except that Supreme Union Boss Pelosi forced government workers to effectively go on strike against us, the taxpayers; she treated their personal lives and misfortunes as if they were bargaining chips in a game of chicken with President Trump. Even some Democrats were saying “give Trump his money for a wall” in exchange for their pet projects: legalization of Dreamers, etc.

Strident conservative voices (ahem, Ann Coulter) should be discounted for their apparent obsession with publicizing their opinions. I don’t see Trump losing support from his base—he’s probably gaining with the independent middle who see the need for border barriers and the duplicity of Democrats who, up until Trump proposed it, voted for border fencing.

Trump would, however, see weak-kneed Republican Senators start to cave in to media pressure. Any “sick-out” work slowdown by TSA workers (mistakenly unionized at TSA’s inception) could have led to problems for Trump, who knows when to fold ‘em.

As it stands, I see no political downside to playing hardball with the radicalized, “open borders” leftist Democrats led by Pelosi. We wanted Trump over other Republicans because he fights and, the present retreat aside, he will never go soft on his principles in order to appease the Democrat/media left. MAGA!

More reprehensible than what Trump has supposedly said, done or tweeted—or even the despicable tactics of Pelosi holding federal workers hostage to her pathological hatred for Trump’s border wall—has been the diabolical, abusive way the Covington Catholic boys were treated.

Just reverse the roles for a moment and write the narrative: Some African-American boys wearing Obama “HOPE” shirts, waiting for a bus after a “Million Man March,” are regaled with racist, offensive, homophobic slurs by white men. Add a Tea Party hat-wearing guy who intentionally walks up to within inches of one of the boys, loudly singing “God Bless America” and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while the young black high schooler does his best to maintain his composure, standing his ground on the sidewalk.

His fellow students might respond to the provocation with some verbal comments while shouting a school “spirit” chant to drown out the Tea Party man. Do you honestly think for one minute that the news media would have portrayed TP man sympathetically, focusing on the supposed “smirk” in the kid’s expression, and the threatening black kids’ actions and words?

Of course not! Would anyone have blathered hatefully about the “toxic” threat of black boys and the implied socialist message of their HOPE shirts? No way! Would Barack Obama have been held responsible if any black kids lost their cool and pushed or shoved TP man? Not for one minute!

And yet, NBC’s Savanah Guthrie had the gall to suggestively ask Make America Great Again hat-wearing 16-year-old Nick Sandmann, “Do you see your own fault?” The world, certainly Ms. Guthrie, had ample time to review the entirety of the tape that graphically showed the Black Hebrew Israelites’ racist, homophobic shouted slurs and Native American Nathan Philips clearly walking into the face of young Sandmann rather than around the group to the Lincoln Memorial. Philips had no intention of calming the confrontation down or he would have interceded to temper the B.H.I. invective. Every word of his Saturday CNN interview was a lie.

Another NBC News person, Noah Berlatsky, disputed that Sandmann was a “silent bystander”; Noah tweeted ludicrously that “his MAGA hat spoke for him.” Is Margaret Carlson allowed to lie for the Daily Beast and tweet that Sandmann “(got) up in the face of” tribal drummer Philips, when it was the opposite, as the video proves? One cable news woman actually bloviated that the MAGA hat was like the white KKK hood. Are these loons so surrounded by like-minded idiots that that makes sense?

Reverse the roles; it’s inconceivable that there would be death threats, exposure of personal information (“doxxing”; GQ’s Nathaniel Friedman urged people to “Doxx ‘em all”), and efforts to get the relatives of the black students fired and their school destroyed. Best-selling author Reza Aslan said the kid had a “punchable face.” Howard Dean: Covington Catholic is “a hate factory.” Even The Atlantic noticed that “The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story. And the damage to their credibility will be lasting.”

 In “This is How the Left Destroys Itself,” Conor Friedersdorf asks “why the left gets caught in politically counter-productive overreaction like over the Covington kid.” Maybe what we need are 63,000,000 MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters rallying “to tell these totalitarian freaks that we still have a First Amendment in this country where people are allowed to peaceably assemble and support their president through speech or attire.”

Finally, the Native American drummer turns out to have a violent, criminal past, including the military brig, and is a serial fabricator who never served in Vietnam, never saw combat, never had an “honorable” discharge, tried to break into a Catholic mass the day before the confrontation and routinely creates confrontation only to play the victim for the press. What a 24-carat phony and troublemaker.