Don's Tuesday column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/25/2013

Lies, the presidency, lawyers and nation

Plan to attend tonight’s Tea Party Patriots’ meeting for a DVD presentation called “Whistleblowers of the National Security Agency.” It promises to be timely and eye opening.

I ran across an insightful column by Dr. Thomas Sowell, “The Loss of Trust (subhead: Every untruth damages the presidency, not just the president)”. He began: “Amid all the heated crosscurrents of debate about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, there is a growing distrust of the Obama Administration that makes weighing the costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess.” As I pointed out, a CNN/ORC poll found half of Americans say they don’t believe Obama is “honest and trustworthy and 61 percent disapprove of” the NSA spying on Americans.

When the little boy cried “wolf” without cause, people doubted when he saw a real wolf; Americans have—in spite of their hopes for President Obama to bring about whatever “change” meant to them—found instead a prevaricating, disingenuous pol from the ends-justifies-the-means, “bring a gun to a knife fight” school of Chicago hardball politics. The NSA programs may well have thwarted terrorist attacks; I believe it’s likely, just as the anti-terror policies under President Bush stopped attacks. However, Democrats had crass political motives to never give Bush credit. Republicans extend a bit more benefit of the doubt to Obama, even while reserving judgment over whether the programs may become abusive of essential American liberties.

Thomas Sowell recalls the trust, from all sides of politics, when President John F. Kennedy “took this country to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union,” without backlash or second-guessing. Sowell bemoaned losing acceptance that those in high positions knew much more than we did and would make righteous decisions.

“Whatever happened to that feeling? Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon happened, and both were shameless liars. They destroyed not only their own credibility, but also the credibility of the office. Even when Lyndon Johnson told us the truth at a crucial juncture during the Vietnam War—that the Communist offensive of 1968 was a defeat for them, even as the media depicted it as a defeat for us—we didn’t believe him.

“In later years, Communist leaders themselves admitted that they had been devastated on the battlefield. But by then it was too late. What the Communists lost militarily on the ground in Vietnam they won politically in the American media and in American public opinion. More than 50,000 Americans lost their lives winning battles on the ground in Vietnam, only to have the war lost politically back home.

“We seem to be having a similar scenario unfolding in Iraq, where soldiers won the war, only to have politicians lose the peace, as Iraq now increasingly aligns itself with Iran. When Barack Obama squanders his own credibility with his glib lies he is not just injuring himself during his time in office. He is inflicting a lasting wound on the country as a whole. But we the voters are not blameless. Having chosen an untested man to be president, on the basis of rhetoric, style, and symbolism, we have ourselves to blame….”

Dr. Thomas Sowell has academic achievements from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, has taught economics at numerous esteemed universities and has, since 1980, been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He also served in the United States Marine Corps in the Korean War, and is African-American.

I made short mention of the pro-Obama slant to political donations by various federal employees last week. The law requires donors beyond a certain amount to state name and employer, which can reveal much of the political leanings of those in various agencies. As I recall, donations from identifiable IRS employees heavily favored Obama. When the donations of the IRS employees union were examined, that rose to 100 percent for Obama—meaning your taxes paid IRS employees, whose mandatory union dues you paid for, from which political donations were skimmed to the benefit of one candidate, the candidate advocating for bigger government, and whose health care law specifically called for many thousands more IRS employees. He might as well have run as B. K. Rupt (D.C.) but his real name was Barack Obama.

Robert Anderson of Pepperdine University found, when he searched the database for contributors with the term “lawyer” or “attorney” in the occupation field, “a list of 20 federal agencies with at least 20 employees contributing to either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.” IRS lawyers gave “95 percent” to Obama; while previous reporting showed a 4-to-1 Obama slant, the actual number was 20-to-1, and when the dollar amounts were counted, IRS lawyers gave 32 times as much to Obama as Romney.

Moreover, IRS lawyers were only the 10^th most slanted in contributions. From the FTC, the EPA, the FERC (energy), Public Defender, FINRA, Dept. of Labor, Education, UN and the NLRB, over 500 lawyers gave up to 100 percent to the Obama campaign. It’s a “symptom of a larger disease—the rule by career bureaucrat lawyers.” Government employees, lawyers in particular, are not politically representative of the country as a whole, and utterly devoid of the political diversity required to serve Americans. You have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers; when agencies can act as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, you are facing an adversary, not a servant. More in future columns on declining constitutional rights and protections.