Don's Tuesday Column

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News  6/27/2017

                    Escaping heat, finding fake news

Among the meteorologically dramatic, but entirely pleasant, events you can experience has to be the transition from the blast furnace-like heat of our summer scorchers to cool spring conditions at higher elevations. I once worked in blast furnaces; the 130+ degree air in a parking lot is pretty close. You should try Lassen Park or the Coast Range off of Hwy 36.

Our summer travels began with just such a change of scenery as we left with a fully packed motorhome on a “heat wave” Thursday, just as the mercury shot through 95 degrees on its way to 108. It felt like being chased by a thermal tsunami as we watched the hills above Redding approach, and the first views of Shasta Lake radiated a hint of “cool.” However, the only cool air was coming out of the dash air conditioning vents and it stayed that way until we rose above Klamath Falls, Oregon to the 4,000-foot elevation of pine tree lined Hwy 97.

At the Collier Park day use area on the Williamson River, a “hooray” left our lips as we beheld the flowers of spring still blooming. At home, we opened all the windows to catch the nighttime cool breezes, a habit abandoned for 80-degree nights. In Bend, windows got shut to keep out 50-degree breezes in the early morning—a minor problem, to be sure. When you read this, I hope you’re back to 90s (highs) and 60s (lows).

Our destination, the West Yellowstone area of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, at 6,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation, has only this week transitioned from average highs in the 60s to balmier 70s. An 85-degree day will prompt locals to remark on “the heat”; we will try not to comment.

Unlike past summer travels when I left weeks of written columns to run while traveling (columnists often compose “evergreen” pieces that can run anytime); this trip, I’ll write on the road, or in the campground, as time and inspiration allow. A missed week shouldn’t concern you.

A quote from a piece by Matthew Continetti is an advisory and insight into what passes for journalism in today’s contentious, partisan atmosphere: “Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and attain…

“The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn’t telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future. The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case. More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink dogma, emotions or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of (Obama advisor) Ben Rhodes, ‘literally know nothing.’ There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page.”

Continetti ties it into the Georgia 6 election, the 2016 election and the Trump-Russia story. Georgia: the blatant merging of skewed polling (in favor of Democrat Ossoff), the inability or unwilling blindness of the media to honestly report on the half of the electorate that voted for and strongly support Trump, and the revulsion of the same to the hate and hysteria from the Democrat left (i.e. Nancy Pelosi) and to the unhinged, disconnected and mindless blathering from Hollywood. Apply the same observations to last November’s election with little nuance.

No one on our side of the ideological struggle should ever let the MSN, the Democrats and the progressive left off the hook for making up out of whole cloth the phony conspiracy that Donald Trump “colluded” with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the election.

Over 7 months ago, as the sobering, depressing (for Hillary et al) reality of Donald Trump’s stunning victory set in, the Clinton-istas—together (knowingly or not) with Obama et al—concocted one of the all-time greatest political hoaxes in American history. Obama set up the intelligence agencies to disseminate endless leaks designed to undermine the incoming president. The phony “dossier” commissioned by Democrats gave the FBI and news media salacious slime.

Actually, it ranks up there with the kook fringe conspiracies over 9/11, certainly beyond the phony “stolen election” of George Bush in 2000 and Diebold-hacked election machines in Ohio, etc, that reelected President Bush in 2004. They love hoaxes; fevered hysteria rules leftists.

Before departing we caught—via the streaming of internet—President Trump’s rally in Cedar Falls, Iowa, which proved how marginalized the news media are in their ability to control the dissemination of content not conforming to their preferred narrative. A CBS reporter, covering the waiting fans as if it were a foreign cult, asked if they thought he was making up news stories. Informed of his CBS affiliation, a man managed to say, “Yeah, some of your news is slanted,” before the interview was cut.

If it were me, I would simply have referred to the obsessive stories over Trump-Russia as exhibits A through Z of phony news based on lying, duplicitous “sources” violating every oath and law they swore to uphold. All to reverse the voters decision to elect Donald Trump as President. Treasonous and shameful! All of the political players working to that end are the “useful idiots” doing the bidding of America’s enemies and adversaries—including Russia.