Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   12/28/2021

       Happy Christmas and New Year, Brandon

Many of us appreciate a good practical joke if no actual harm is done. We fondly recall the pranks among fellow square dance campers many years ago: Covering a camper’s windows with foil so he’d think it was still night; pancakes with foil inside. A wood post with water spigot, pipe and electric plug-in box affixed, put in the ground at a non-hookup site, waiting for a new camper to try to get water or power. The prankster would then offer to help and pick up the fake post to try to find a better location.

Unfortunately, even the timeless art of jocular insults has been subjected to the furrowed-brow, too-serious-to-laugh “woke-sters”; “that’s not funny,” they’ll chide us. Decades of ever-meaner, sicker, dehumanizing non-humor has targeted Republicans, conservatives, Tea Party-ers, and figures like George Bush, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Skits and jokes about raping Palin or her daughter, and the disgusting-but-proud display of a fake bloody Trump head by Kathy Griffin come to mind.

Someone assembled minutes-long audio of prominent Democrats rationalizing, encouraging, even threatening, physical violence against the above groups and people; your left-leaning networks, cable and web sources don’t object to such violent threats.

Rep. Maxine Waters told her supporters to physically accost people from Trump’s White House; Joe Biden repeatedly said he’d have beaten Trump up behind the gym. Antifa’s physical, life-threatening attacks targeted Senator Rand Paul and his wife leaving a Trump Rose Garden event. Venezuela’s “Chavistas” attacked regime opponents; Hitler’s “Brownshirts” assaulted his. Mao’s Red Guard murdered enemies wantonly.

The usual hypocrites, in disingenuous high dudgeon, pounced on Fox News’ Jesse Watters for advising a conservative group to “ambush” Dr. (treats-no-patients) Fauci, and “deliver a killshot.” Was Watters actually telling the audience to “set an ambushment,” and violently, fatally attack Fauci? CNN’s John Berman cherry-picked those phrases while saying, “On the subject of divisiveness, Dr. Fauci, I'm not going to play it because frankly, I think it's dangerous.”

“By looking at the entirety of Watters' remarks, it's plain to see Watters is using a metaphor to talk about a type of interview where an unsuspecting public official is confronted on camera by a journalist or truth-seeking American and asked uncomfortable questions about their policies or past statements in order to elicit a reaction or catch them in a lie to create a viral moment.

“‘Let's just say Fauci comes to town. ... You got to ambush a guy like Fauci. Okay? This is how you do these ambushes like [Project Veritas'] James O'Keefe. You gotta be respectful because they'll turn the tables on you and have it blow up in your face,’ Watters said” (Micah Rate, Townhall.com). Watters is clearly only encouraging tactics used by “60 Minutes” and every news hound for decades wanting an unprepared, non-press-release answer from a politician.

In Fauci’s case, he has given (or avoided) contradictory, fallacious advice and explanations on the Wuhan lab vs. bat source of Covid, masks, business lockdowns, school shutdowns, natural immunity, therapeutics, etc. He gets softball questions and is never confronted over his changing positions.

Just like the predictable, knee-jerk calls for Jesse Watters’ firing, we now have the vindictive left out for the hide, or job, of the Oregon dad who “punked” President-ish Joe Biden on the NORAD Santa-watch phone line. With a wry smile, he told Joe and Jill, “I hope you guys have a wonderful Christmas as well—Merry Christmas and let’s go, Brandon.” Joe: “Let’s go, Brandon, I agree.” Joe (bleeping) himself?

“It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that Biden is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.

“Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency, is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.” (from “Biden Emerges as Progressive Government’s Mr. Bad Example,” by Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal)

“The same shameful crowd, spouting evidence-free charges and character assassination, now wants Trump and his 74+ million supporters to say, ‘Never mind, forget the past.’ What’s galling is Big Media, Big Tech, the Deep State, Big Hollywood and Big Ed collectively telling us that the election of His Fraudulency, Joe Biden is totally legitimate in spite of provable, massive fraud.

“Past columns cited hundreds of legal affidavits proving fraudulent, illegal and unconstitutional voting shenanigans. News outlets proclaimed the guilt of Trump for outrageous accusations; and collaborated to kill the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop with troves of evidence of Joe Biden’s, and his family’s, corrupt financial racket with China and Ukraine. They now shun election whistleblowers calling fowl on Democrat cheating for Biden and have no interest in the greatest election theft in America’s history.” (The Way I See It, Don Polson, 12/22/2020)

Americans: “Cheating affected the 2020 election, 40%; Cheating occurred, 59%; Stop election cheating, 65%.”