Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   8/14/2018

Comparing fabulists and liars

There are fabulists, spinners, exaggerators, puffers (a real estate euphemism); likewise, “smoke and mirrors,” disingenuous speakers, common liars, scammers, schemers, con artists and politicians. One’s veracity is a matter of character and choice; easily discoverable misstatements bring either retractions or personal stain.

Mr. Minch, making the political personal as is his wont, seems to think that President Donald J. Trump is a common liar, perhaps even pathological as many on the left believe. For Minch, it seems that Trump’s supporters—I among them—must either call Trump a liar or be criticized with character attacks for our choice to take Trump “seriously, not literally.”

It is perhaps to be expected that supporters of any political leader will give their guy or gal the benefit of the doubt when they are attacked, no? I must inquire whether Mr. Minch considers applying the same standard of truthfulness to his preferred leaders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (Bill Clinton fails any such standard, agreed?). Before I consider Minch’s demand, I will insist he take a stand on the verifiable lies and deceptions of those two Democrats and their records.

I think it matters a lot if there were serious consequences to the lies of Clinton and Obama compared to the misstatements of Trump. Hillary’s lies about snipers firing when she landed in Bosnia, when there was video of children greeting her, were pathetic but inconsequential. Her lies about her private server, on the other hand, were deeply corrupt and undermined our nation; testimony revealed that a foreign country accessed all of her emails. Her email deception was determined to be criminal until an Obama hack changed “gross negligence” to “extremely careless,” and said that she “lacked intent” to break the law.  

Were their lies designed and intended to persuade Americans and our elected representatives of things that were manifestly untrue—as in the lies used to sell Obamacare to Americans and Congress—or even evil, as in the Iran deal?

Nothing Trump has said comes close to the Iran deal’s monumental frauds: 1) It had no legitimacy as a treaty; 2) It was sold to one and all by Obama and his admitted liar and advisor, Ben Rhodes, as a restraint on Iran’s nuclear ambitions while, in reality, it assured the ultimate acquisition of both nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them; 3) Obama not only conveyed to Iran, under cover of darkness and through secret transfers, many billions of U.S. dollars, but he pressured banks, unsuccessfully, to “launder” Iranian currency into dollars—itself illegal; and 4) Based on all that, Obama duplicitously lifted sanctions.

Don’t lecture me about Trump’s lies until you take a stand on these other Obama lies, scandals and atrocities. Consider how Obama deceived Americans about his so-called “recovery,” which ranked as the worst economic recovery in modern history. How many “summers of recovery” did Biden and Obama promise? How many times did Obama tout “the new normal” of sub-2 percent growth, and “jobs that weren’t coming back”? All blarney peddled to maintain the illusion of Obama’s and Democrats’ competence.

Obama alone set the stage to use “weaponized” government agencies to go after his political “enemies”—lovers of liberal media are aghast that Trump uses “enemies of the people” to describe how the news media make up stuff or spin the news to create false narratives. When they work to reverse the election, the media are certainly the enemies of Trump’s voters.

The IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups was merely the predecessor of the FBI, DOJ, CIA conspiracy targeting first candidate-Trump, then President Trump with lies paid for by the Clinton campaign, written by British ex-spy Christopher Steele based on stories made up by Russians in and out of government. There’s your actual Russian collusion.

It was Obama’s “Fast and Furious” gun running scandal that was steeped in lies, deception and deflection—with a body count of hundreds, including Border Patrol agents. It was designed and implemented to provide a phony predicate for attacking and prosecuting legal American gun dealers for participating in the very gun sales into which Obama’s ATF induced them.

It was on Obama’s watch that Americans heard the monumental lies over the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, resulting in the deaths of Amb. Greg Stevens and 3 heroic staff and security. Obama, NSA Susan Rice and SecState Hillary Clinton all lied through their teeth that an anti-Muslim YouTube created a protest by, apparently, RPG- and AK-47-carrying Libyan men. Lies upon lies.

Obama was stymied by Congress’ refusal to agree to close Gitmo and so he deflected, deceived and delivered terrorist inmates to the custody of nations that often then released them to go back to the battlefield, even killing American military and civilians. I see that as an evil level of deception costing innocent lives.

I see a scandalous example of duplicitous illegality in Obama’s firing an inspector general, Gerald Walpin. He discovered that Sacramento mayor, former NBA star and Obama buddy, Kevin Johnson, funneled nearly a million dollars of Americorps grant money to his own nonprofit organization to pay volunteers for political activity. Some of that money was also used for hush money payments to three students for sex favors. Walpin recommended criminal charges, refused to resign and was fired by Obama.

So, while Mr. Minch and the country’s entrenched leftist elements caterwaul about Trump’s lies, “many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the State Department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another—and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president.” They then fought congressional requests to release incriminating information, then with such heavy redactions that they are almost indecipherable (Victor Davis Hansen).