Don's Tuesday column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  (530) 515-2137      Red Bluff Daily News   //2013

The more things change, they remain the same

As I read and reflected on the “hate Polson” screed from Mr. Larry Gray (titled “Hypocrisies” 5/30), I thought “Where have I read all of this before?” I researched my Polecat News and Views (donpolson.blogspot.com) posts and my own file of columns since 2005. Not surprisingly, I found nearly identical character assassination and anathema nearly 4 years ago, similarly following one of my “salute and commemorate the fallen vets” columns.

For the time being, while endless space won’t be used responding to a critic, the charge of “hypocrisies” will not be ignored. Mr. Gray’s broadside would seem to focus on the change of heart I have had over the decades: going from a campus anti-war radical for the 2 years I was in college—after which I sought out religious communities in California out of disgust over the moral and political corruption I found in the anti-war movement—back to my conservative upbringing in more recent decades. I suppose the college-bound course, with scholarships, set for me by my parents, and the requisite college deferments for ‘69/’70 and ‘70/’71 terms, can be criticized if someone is determined to throw disingenuous bricks at my life. I further suppose that having a draft lottery number too high to get drafted likewise won’t let me off the hook for someone like Mr. Gray. I guess being a scrawny kid that wouldn’t have met the height/weight requirements anyway will not sway the man.

However, none of that puts me outside the mainstream of college age youth in 1970. I never, let me repeat never, did one single thing to disrespect any member of the military and have never suggested so much; for Mr. Gray to, in essence, lump me in with draft dodgers and those who spit at and harassed returning troops is truly despicable and deserves my absolute condemnation. I’ll let readers decide what’s normal or diabolical.

You may be scratching your head, therefore, over the fuss. That’s where having perspective on the same complaints from Mr. Gray, 4 years apart, with virtually the same verbiage and illogical arguments, is revealing. He singles me out for my temerity in criticizing President Obama. Indeed, in June of 2009, Gray vehemently objected to my including criticisms of Obama in my “Honoring vets, what they died and serve for” Memorial Day column.

At that time, I noted that Obama was not well regarded by the military, who mostly voted for his opponent, Mr. McCain. Obama was manipulating the health care for wounded veterans, trying to force them onto private plans, reneging on the implied promises of our government to care for them. Obama released (“leaked” you might say) “interrogation memos” that provided potential captured terrorists with a roadmap to know how to resist the methods that were still permitted to use. Obama was going to allow the release of photos that, while showing nothing previously unknown, would have aroused more anger among Muslims, directed at our military.

The final bit of hypocrisy, I wrote: “Obama had the gall to tell a graduating class of cadets that he wouldn’t send them into battle without complete support from America. This from the guy who actually voted against funding a war his party voted to authorize, who proclaimed the surge doomed before it started, and who refused to visit wounded military in Germany on his trip there.”

Currently we have more of the same hypocrisy from Obama: As U.S. Senator, he said “The president does not have the power under the constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” As President, of course, Obama not only unilaterally dispatched forces to Libya, he didn’t even bother to follow up 90 days later with a request for authorization, as specified under the War Powers Act. (hat tip to Powerlineblog.com)

Mr. Gray had his say; I’ve now had mine. If any readers wish to peruse my meticulous arguments that ensued 4 years ago, including point-by-point rebuttals to Gray’s diatribes, go to “Polecat News and Views” (DonPolson.blogspot.com), where I will repost the relevant blog entries from the “critics” label of June 15 and 18, and July 26, 2009. You should read nothing more of the matter on this page.

I hope you read my union hack critic last Friday: With such classy (NOT!) form of arguments (“talk out his butt”) and irrefutable logic (“(my) constant slamming of union labor”/the writer had to go back 7 months for my last “constant” comment). Then the reductio-ad-censorum: these clowns always default to wanting to get rid of me, such is their respect for free speech and diversity of thought. With private sector union membership barely over 6.5 percent of the workforce, it’s not this columnist who’s out of touch. The union verbal thug thinks he’ll intimidate me—guess again, loser.

Next week, readers should expect to learn more about the greatest affront to America’s system of freedom, liberty, Constitutional rights and self-rule in our time: the IRS targeting, profiling to use one of the left’s buzzwords, of conservative, Christian, voter integrity and even pro-Israel groups since 2008. That despicable abuse of power has, at the very least, verbal leadership that comes from President Obama himself; it deserves unremitting critical examination. News media, the MSM, are going to do their best to tell us all to “move along, nothing to see here” but Americans of all political stripes are outraged and likely to become more so.