Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   3/07/2017

             Subversion, “astro-turf” and crimes

The marvelous speech that President Donald Trump delivered to Congress last Tuesday night certainly deserved bipartisan kudos, including from a reliably liberal local columnist. The speech gave Trump a venue for framing his basic goals and policies—advocated consistently from the earliest speeches in his campaign—in a way, a tone and with logical underpinnings that appealed to all but the hardest of Democrat partisans.

I can see how it would have been unnerving to serious thinkers on the left because Trump’s speech seemed to appeal not only to Republicans and independents but also to sober-minded Democrats wanting improved security, health care and economic growth. The howling and hysteria from the far left is for naught without a message and plan to begin reversing the loss of over 1,000 elections to Republicans. That goal is fraught with political and ideological landmines of the “further left’s” doing, since any efforts by Democratic office holders to move to the center, and agree (or even work) with Republicans on issues most Americans care about, will earn them a primary opponent funded with money and vitriol from their “further left” base.

The response by the permanent governing class in Washington—together with the organized masses (which may number between 30,000 and 50,000) of leftist, social justice, feminist, gender, environmental and union activists—began even prior to Trump’s inauguration. Bureaucrats and public employees in numerous agencies, including national security, have circulated their “resistance” in emails and on Facebook, together with their mutual support for undermining the Trump administration at every turn. While not treasonous, it is subversive.

The seemingly broad appeal of the Women’s March (WM) was a chimera, an illusion driven by the obsessive and slavish coverage of news media. Witness how the same WM leaders, including radical Muslim anti-Israel fanatics, are now reported to be coordinating with broader anti-capitalist groups for future demonstrations. Sorry, Americans like their economic freedom.

Paul Sperry wrote “Obama-linked activists have a ‘training manual’ for protesting Trump” on 2/18: “An Obama-tied activist group, training tens of thousands of agitators to protest President Trump’s policies, plans to hit Republican lawmakers supporting those policies even harder this week, when they return home for the congressional recess and hold town halls…

“Organizing for Action (OFA), a group founded by Obama and featured prominently on his new post-presidency website, is distributing a training manual to anti-Trump activists that advises them to bully GOP lawmakers into backing off support for repealing ObamaCare, curbing immigration from high-risk Islamic nations, and building a border wall…

“The manual, published with OFA partner ‘Indivisible,’ advises protesters to go into halls quietly so as not to raise alarms, and ‘grab seats at the front of the room but do not all sit together.’ Rather, spread out in pairs to make it seem like the whole room opposes the Republican host’s positions. ‘This will help reinforce the impression of broad consensus.’ It also urges them to ask ‘hostile’ questions—while keeping ‘a firm hold on the mic’—and loudly boo the GOP politician if he isn’t ‘giving you real answers.’

“After the event, protesters are advised to feed video footage to local and national media. ‘Unfavorable exchanges caught on video can be devastating’ for Republican lawmakers, it says, when ‘shared through social media and picked up by local and national media.’”

Anyone watching the news has probably seen footage similar to what was shown on Sunday, where these loud, rude activists displayed such quasi-violent tactics at Congressman Tom McClintock’s town hall. I don’t blame local Rep. Doug LaMalfa for his successful avoidance of these “astro-turf” rent-a-mobs, seeded with a fair quota of “just regular folks” that never voted for him, never voted for a Republican and represent one-fourth, at most, of voters.

President Trump has insisted that he’s moving ahead with plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which has ballooned health-insurance premiums and deductibles. “Obamacare is a disaster, folks,” he said, adding that activists protesting its repeal are hijacking GOP town halls and other events. “They fill up our rallies with people that you wonder how they get there,” Trump said. “But they’re not the Republican people (supporting) our representatives.”

In fact, Obama appears to be behind the anti-Trump protests—he praised demonstrations against Trump’s travel ban. He personally rallied OFA troops to “protect” his legacy in a conference call; he promised OFA activists he would soon join them in the fray. “Understand that I’m going to be constrained…until I am again a private citizen…You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.” (Said the Alinsky-ite)

 I’m reserving judgment on Trump’s weekend tweet about Obama “tapping” his “wires.” However, conservative firebrand Kurt Schlichter wrote, on Feb. 20, about the “Russian/Flynn nonsense, a non-story that America non-cares about. Oh, there’s a real story there, but the press isn’t interested in that. Here’s the real story—the intelligence community under the Obama administration was obviously eavesdropping on Trump’s campaign in violation of practically every law ever written. Whether it was direct tapping of phones and emails, or illegally accessing the communications swooped up by the NSA in its nets, it’s clear that Obama’s people were spying on Obama’s political opponents.

“The transcript excerpts of Flynn’s phone call with the Russian diplomat leaked because it could be played off as targeting the Russian, though this was still an outrageous disclosure…The only question really is what did Obama know, and when did he know it?”