Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   11/07/2017

                    Faces, motives show reach of evil

Only a heart of stone would fail to mourn over an act of such evil as just occurred in the murderous slaughter at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. It is enraging, horrifying and heartbreaking to realize that an unhinged atheist, who had hateful Facebook posts ranting against Christians, would attire and equip himself as if he were assaulting a military objective, only to walk into—and open fire on—a place of peace, soul-inspiring reverence and (presumably unarmed) innocent worshipers.

As of Monday news reports, we know 1) that he lied on a form to purchase guns because 2) he was convicted of violent crimes against his own spouse and dishonorably discharged from the military so that 3) there is no cause for anti-gun screeds or new gun laws. He shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a gun; the existing regulations failed to get enforced. As surely as we knew that the punk/puke that murdered black churchgoers in Charlottesville, NC, did so out of racial hatred, we should know and acknowledge this killer’s anti-Christian motivations. Shouldn’t we?

My last word is that churches need to take proactive steps to assure their congregants and attendees that some among them legally carry guns. It has been rightly said that when seconds count, police or sheriffs deputies are only minutes away. As it happened, two armed citizens confronted the killer—who ran at the sight of them—and ended his rampage. “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition” was well stated in times past.

On other murderous rampages: I believe the Las Vegas shooter, in spite of meticulous efforts to hide any motive, left his purpose in plain sight. He intended to provide, in his sick, twisted way, an abominable lesson in how an arsenal could be acquired and used to kill a lot of people; he wanted to provoke the reaction he got. He wanted an anti-gun reaction, as I see it.

The Muslim jihadist that slaughtered people on a New York City bike path with a rental truck made his motive clear with an Islamic State flag, social media posts and the Islamic phrase, “Allahu Akbar,” yelled out as he left his crashed truck. I see a despicable false equivalence in the trite interpretation of that phrase as “God is great,” which misstates, even hides, its true meaning. Spoken by a Muslim, it means roughly that Allah is not just the only deity, not just “great” but is superior to all other religious holy figures; all others are inferior and those who follow other religions are “infidels” or nonbelievers and must submit to, and revere, Allah. Not happening.

Overshadowed by Sunday’s Texas slaughter was the violent assault on Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul by a vicious hater-of-Republicans who lived near Paul’s home. The injuries were serious, were inflicted in a cowardly, blindsided attack, and emanated from the same vile well of political antipathy that produced the wannabe killer-of-Republicans at the baseball practice outside of Washington, DC. That gun-toting Bernie Sanders fanatic might have succeeded in slaughtering many Republicans that day, including Rand Paul, had not armed security selflessly come to the defense of the Congressmen and ended the siege.

“Maybe new facts will emerge. Maybe there is some other reason why Boucher assaulted Senator Paul…But that seems unlikely. It appears that Boucher’s assault of the Republican senator is another instance of political violence prompted by the climate of hate that has been fostered by the Democrat Party. Where will it end?” (John Hinderaker, Powerlineblog.com)

It has been a year since candidate Donald J. Trump was elected President and he would be elected again, in spite of low polling approval. If such a poll asks the question of who the respondent voted for, it shows that Trump’s supporters remain with him, as this writer proudly does; if the pollster doesn’t ask, they just don’t want people to know that Trump still wins.

I haven’t engaged in “Twitter” or “Facebook” on the sending, receiving or reading side. However, I just made a bookmark in my Internet browser for “@realDonaldTrump” so that I can read all of his tweets, not just those that news media Democrats-with-bylines choose to gin up their “two minutes of hate” and ancillary outrage. I recommend you do the same, even if you don’t support President Trump. It is another way that Trump follows a Reagan-like strategy: go around the opposition in the media directly to the people. Thank God for a president that forthrightly points out that a bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good guy with a gun.

Election anniversary analysis and perspective is out there and worth reading: “Trump has made many Americans feel connected again” by Selena Zito was in the “Irish Times.” The subtitle goes: “Trump—one year on: Those who voted for him are still optimistic—and in Erie, Pennsylvania, a former Obama stronghold, they would do so again.” In “America still hasn’t recovered from Trump’s shocking win,” Zito (writing from Sterling Heights, Michigan) recounted the still-raw emotions among diverging voters—sharp pain in one Democrat’s gut; a Republican’s thrill over deregulation and the Paris Agreement exit—in a formerly “blue state” that secured Trump’s electoral win.

On the Russia/Trump/Hillary issue, Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett writes, “Still no evidence of Trump-Russia ‘collusion’—but Hillary is a different matter.” “To put it plainly, Mueller is tasked with finding a crime that does not exist in the law. It is a legal impossibility. He is being asked to do something that is manifestly unattainable…Hillary Clinton (could be) the one who was conspiring with the Russians by breaking campaign finance laws with impunity.” Read it.

The more we find out about actual Russian interference, we find, as Joel Pollak writes in “Blue State Blues,” that the “Media, politicians gave Russia a map of America’s divisions.” It “was bipartisan. There are anti-Clinton Russian trolls and ‘bots,’ and agitators on the other side.”