Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   (530) 515-2137   Red Bluff Daily News   9/18/2018

Biased, statistical propaganda

Natural disasters sure have a way of showing us the good, the bad and the ugly of humanity; throw in the heroic, the tragic and the noble actions from the highest levels of government to the “Cajun navy.” They’re small craft owners that trailer their boats to the edge of flooded roads and slip the craft into the unknown watery perils to seek out those needing rescue from porches, second floors and rooftops. Nature’s furious extreme weather phenomena, like the poor, are always with us.

Unfortunately, compounding the misery with shamefully shallow and partisan score-keeping, we now must contend with pre-disaster narrative-forming, spinning of politicians’ and governments’ responses and made-up information generated for crass character assassination. Democrats found—in the understandably flawed actions (limited by Louisiana Democrats) of President Bush in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005—that making political hay with demagogic assertions of blame, together with despicable inferences of racism, was guaranteed to carry the PR war forward to their advantage.

I almost have more respect for looters than the political hustlers that try to paint their opponents as racists, heartless Hitler-wannabes for nothing other than a less-than-perfect response to natural disaster and human misery. Can’t we just start with sincere acceptance that everyone has good intentions and is trying their best, and wait for the “after action” report to assign responsibility for shortcomings?

Looters make no pretense to civilized behavior as they help themselves to other people’s stuff. Political looters like current (and previous) Democrats stoke the media-generated themes of incompetence (whether or not it happened), indifference (without a shred of evidence), and nearly-evil malintent by then-Bush/now-Trump—such political players are worse for feigning compassion and civility. What they are really doing is using every dishonest verbal, mental and propaganda tool at their disposal to virtually assassinate conservatives. Meanwhile, they refuse to condemn and distance themselves from real violence and threats from the leftist scum of so-called “antifa,” Black Lives Matter (sure, but so do cops’ and others’ lives) and the hysterical, quasi-violent shriekers of “Code Pink.”

Democrat excusers-of-violence (their euphemism: “passionate”) like Chris Coons, Maxine Waters and “progressive” champions of “direct action” on cable shows and leftwing web entities, must (but never do) take responsibility for real policies that result in real dead people: 1) opposition to sensible forest thinning and management which results in deadly wild fires; 2) opposition to secure borders that allows MS-13 gangsters and other criminals in to kill people; 3) support for soft-on-crime prison “reform” that allows violent criminals to “get out of jail free” and become predators. Democrats like Barack Obama demanded that major terrorists be released from Guantanamo, when it was obvious they’d kill again.

 Instead of any shame or embarrassment over such heinous advocacy, Democrats (supported by the artful fabrications of George Washington University computer analysts) began touting the statistical “certainty” that 3,000 people died from hurricane Maria last September in Puerto Rico. And they’re all because of Trump (have they denied thinking so?). Just think rationally for a minute. In New Orleans, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere, hurricane Katrina killed people who were found, identified, mourned and tabulated because their deaths mattered and were a public record. The same with tornadoes, winter storms and earthquakes throughout the civilized world and wherever modern record-keeping is the norm.

Let’s briefly revisit the infamous survey from the British medical journal, The Lancet, that asserted hundreds of thousands of deaths from the Iraq War; they were, of course, all President Bush’s fault. I was writing this column at the time and waited, knowingly, for the debunking of that survey that was sure to come. As usual, the intense peer-review process was skipped, the methodology was assumed to be solid and beyond reproach; so, only conservative and brave non-partisan analysts dared to question it.

It turned out that they simply questioned samples of the Iraqi population and asked them if they knew of anyone that died from the war and its aftermath. Again, there was no attempt to provide names, dates, locations or any effort to corroborate their results with any local or governmental authorities.

When serious examination and research was done, it turned out that the actual death toll, not just from American bombs and military attacks, but also from the nearly-endless score settling among the warring groups of Iraqis and in-country terrorist reprisals against those perceived to be on America’s (and the legitimate government’s) side—the death toll wasn’t a half a million, or 400,000 or anywhere near that. It was somewhere north of 100,000 and, again, largely not America’s fault. Larger numbers of Iraqis died or were slaughtered under, and directly due to, Saddam Hussein’s policies and religious purges, but never mind.

So, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rossello, a partisan Trump-hater, commissioned the GWU report, which conveniently dove-tailed with, and prior to, a request for $130 billion to “rebuild” from the hurricane; and timed to be a potential political talking point for the November Democrat races. Puerto Rico’s national debt, I read, is conveniently around $130 billion. Anyone who thinks that statistics can’t be twisted, or tortured, to prove almost anything, isn’t paying attention to the “rest of the story” behind much of the social “sciences.” Here, they just fed figures into a computer and, viola, 2,975 hurricane deaths.

Did the governor, or the study’s creators, make any attempt to corroborate the 3,000 figure with reported recovery of bodies or the available figures of missing, and presumed dead, citizens? Of course not. And yet, we had to read the Associated Press’ effort to establish such flawed pseudo-research as the infallible public record, “Trump turns back to Maria, falsely says Dems inflated toll,” which suggested the highly jaundiced opinion that Trump doesn’t care about brown people (“struggled to publicly express empathy”).

I see President Trump as pretty much hitting the mark by disputing the report as propaganda.