Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   4/24/2015

            Ejecting noncustomers; Comey memos

To my chagrin, I read of the brou-ha-ha over the arrest of a couple of men for refusing to buy something or leave a Starbucks while ostensibly waiting for someone. The coverage, the reactions and Starbucks’ corporate genuflection to the “implicit racism” of black/white interaction illustrated the grievance-and-victim-centric obsession with “virtue signaling” as a substitute for principles. To wit, when everything is racism, virtually nothing is racism.

It should be non-controversial for a business to require those using its facilities to make at least a minimum purchase; similarly, the public sees little to complain about when stores post a “Bathrooms are for customers only” notice. They spent the money to build and power the facility, heat, cool and maintain it—all on saved or borrowed money or profits from another business.

Those expenses, together with the investment in employees and training, don’t create a charity or a public place like a park or community center. Paying customers are the lifeblood that determines whether that store will be around in a few years or simply be another statistic in the litany of business failures—having worked in the restaurant, food sales and service field for 2 decades, I know whereof I write.

I remember the first conversation with my store manager, at a Santa Monica Arby’s restaurant when in training to be a night manager, on the subject of homeless street people in the store. They simply weren’t welcome or tolerated when they began occupying seats and remaining longer than it took to drink their cup of coffee (even they knew a small purchase gained initial entry). It was a policy predicated on a previous manager’s soft-hearted indulgence of the rather bereft and slovenly souls, many of whom ended their cross country trek on the “Christopher Columbus” freeway, also known as I-10, in that homeless haven-by-the-sea. The predictable result was that working, paying customers were eating elsewhere.

I’ll never forget one that showed up; he seemed clean and could have passed for a college professor with his beard, worn tweed jacket and coins for coffee. A few months later, wearing the same clothes, he picked his filthy self up from the gas station parking lot and came in to buy coffee. This time, when I returned to the counter from the coffee pot, cup in hand, his smell had begun wafting in all directions, almost gagging those nearby. I quickly walked outside with his cup, making it clear to him that his place was out in fresh air. He was later observed engaging in an imaginary phone calls; the lack of mental health services was sad.

Over the years I had the indignity of being defied by the refuse of society when insisting they leave the store, swung at as they walked out the door, and struck in the back as I turned to call the police. I had one guy’s clothes literally fall off of him after I dragged him out of the store; I had to drag another drunk man out of a restaurant as he was urinating on the floor in front of a family. No matter someone’s race, unless there is an implicit right to remove uncooperative or unruly non-customers, you might as well abandon private ownership of businesses. Enough said.

Let’s turn to the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey, released to the media last week, and see if they support any narratives of the pro- or anti-Trump partisans. He revealed what many of us on Trump’s side have long known: The infamous Steele “dossier” was circulated among some media outlets and Clinton partisans (“infamous” given that its genesis was a corrupt conspiracy between Hillary’s campaign, the DNC, a law firm, ex-British spy C. Steele and actual Russian agents). It still needed an actual “news hook” to warrant coverage; it needed to be “laundered” into a legitimate, though salacious, story.

Comey created the pre-arranged “hook”: “I said media like CNN had [the dossier] and were looking for a news hook,” Comey wrote in a memo just after briefing Trump about the salacious allegations in the dossier. “I said it was inflammatory stuff that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports,” he added. The rest is established—the news outlets now had an excuse to pay attention to what had, and has to this day, no corroboration, verification or truthfulness.

There you have the manipulation that allowed one of the most despicable, underhanded and “trumped up” pieces of campaign dirt to ever disgrace an American presidential contest to morph into a supposedly compromising scandal. It tainted Trump’s legitimacy with nothing more than made-up spy craft bought and paid for by Hillary et al. To be sure, political campaigning has forever been beset and tainted by bovine excrement, the veracity of which was subject to charges, counter charges and exposure, sullying all sides.

Comey admitted that “CNN in particular” was a driving impetus to create his Trump meeting; Buzzfeed then exposed the entire Democrat-created 35-page dossier. Trump supporters are vindicated in denying any of the allegations and affirming Trump’s legitimacy.

“The memos do nothing to discredit President Trump. At every stage he comes across as reasonable, even as described by an enemy. Democrats who try to spin the memos as breathing new life into their collusion campaign must have gotten an early jump on 4/20 (pot day). Comey, in contrast, comes across as a snake in the grass,” creating self-serving memos after talking with Trump.

“He obviously viewed himself as an adversary of the president from the beginning” (J. Hinderaker, Powerlineblog.com). Had Trump fired Comey on day 1, it would have been the justified removal of a major tool for those obsessed with maintaining Obama’s legacy by forcing Trump to resign, or lose in 2020.