Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   2/03/2015

Liberalism gets people killed

The line, “I don’t like you ‘cause you’re gonna get me killed,” from the 1987 cop buddy movie “Lethal Weapon,” summarizes what many of us have concluded about the liberal/leftist/progressive ideological movement that is embedded in much of academia, news media, the Democrat party and even some Republican circles. This includes the obsession with “political correctness” in immigration, Islamic terrorism, crime, gun rights and disease prevention.

The Danny Glover cop character, nearing retirement, was pithily expressing his aversion to being teamed with a suicidal Mel Gipson cop, oblivious to the endless risks he puts himself and his partner in while chasing bad guys. It carries over into current crises facing America. Reticence by a leftist Obama and his liberal mouthpieces to factually state that terrorists, inspired by Islam and gaining conquered territory, have as their sole, religiously-inspired goal, to kill or subjugate all infidels (hint: America remains “the Great Satan). Such reticence and aversion encourages their killing tactics.

Wrong-headed and soft-hearted crime fighting and punishment policies, under liberal influence, get thousands of citizens killed by thugs who no longer fear punishment, or who know the police are becoming risk-averse to aggressively confronting urban violent crime. Progressive-inspired anti-gun ownership policies and legal measures effectively get many people killed who would, left to their own decision-making about self defense, properly and legally own and carry guns.

In another example, the measles outbreak making headlines has been traced in recent analysis to come “from overseas,” which I translate as having a connection to not just people visiting Disneyland from distant foreign countries, but also young border-crossers from Central America over the last year. I wrote a couple of columns last fall on the wide-open health risks of blindly accepting unscreened children and youths walking into America.

I cited reputable sources concerned about “the deadly, debilitating Enterovirus, EV-D68” brought here “via the many tens of thousands of illegal alien children that, with no small encouragement from Obama’s agencies and policies, flagrantly flooded our borders.” Neil Munro (DailyCaller.com) wrote, “Obama’s Border Policy Fueled Epidemic, Evidence Shows” and Scott Johnson (Powerlineblog.com) wrote numerous pieces on “The Case of the Mystery Virus.” I wrote that “It is no longer a case of ‘coincidence doesn’t prove causation’ but rather ‘reasonable suspicion,’ close to ‘probable cause,’ that diseases known and medically identified to exist in Central American countries, accompanied those children to American cities.”

Virologyj.com posted a paper titled “Human rhinoviruses and Enterovirus in influenza-like illness in Latin America.” Internist Dr. Foley wrote, “there is a deafening silence on the part of public health officials and the mainstream media in even speculating about this association. This is not a simple case of being politically selective about the news, it is downright dangerous and could be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the emergence of diseases long absent from daily life in America…”

Get it? A disease “long absent from daily life in America,” is the definition of the measles outbreak in the news. Compounding the outbreak is the aversion—often in the more liberal, generally affluent areas of America—to having children receive the immunizations that the medical scientific authorities strongly recommend to keep scourges like measles a tragic part of our past. Infections numbered in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands with deaths in the thousands before inoculations became routine, often in schools without the slightest hesitancy on the part of parents. They would have personally seen the devastation of childhood contagious diseases under the pre-vaccination regimen.

Much lip service is wasted trying to thread the public relations needle between the importance of getting children vaccinated and the free will of parents to use their own best judgment in making their children’s health decisions. I’m having none of it. As this anti-vaccination belief and mentality is reported highest among affluent liberals, you could make a reasonable case that this segment of Americans are the most likely be critical of those on the right for supposedly being anti-science. It’s a tired and phony trope; such people are hypocrites when faced with genuine scientific certainty over protecting children’s health from contagious diseases.

 One could argue that such expressions of free will, as the “anti-vax-ers” profess, doesn’t endanger vaccinated children when such children are kept out of circulation. However, as the measles outbreak now indisputably demonstrates, the protections afforded by being surrounded by vaccinated children become meaningless when such non-vaccinated kids circulate among those from foreign, even underdeveloped, countries—including illegal immigrants passively carrying virological threats attending, say, Disneyland.

So, when prominent, effectively anti-science, liberals spread disproved assertions of autism from vaccinations, and anecdotal instances of bad reactions, they may well be getting people killed as assuredly as their liberal policies are complicit in criminal violence, Islamic terrorism, and deaths preventable by gun ownership. Yes, liberalism does get people killed.