Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   2/19/2019

         A shooter, phonies and a hate hoax

The 1-year anniversary—over the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida—had barely finished before another deranged criminal gunman took 4 lives, wounding multiple policemen (thankfully recovering). Both deserve our serious regard and, if we are willing and courageous enough, dispassionate examination of causes and enabling policy.

Florida’s new Republican Governor DeSantis is rightfully adamant that a grand jury take a broad look at what led to the M.S. Douglas High School shooting, including school security, safety and the role of diversion efforts, such as the “PROMISE” program. That allowed the killer, Nikolas Cruz, to attend in the lax security of non-offender schools.

We should point to the misguided efforts, of the Obama Education Department, to address the so-called “school-to-jail pipeline” by insisting that disciplinary measures be matched to the racial makeup of the school—regardless of the actual race of the misbehaving students. The result, in Cruz’s case, was to not be turned over to law enforcement when he committed crimes like assault, crimes that would have kept him both out of that high school, and from buying guns. Ironically, it may have been his Hispanic-sounding last name that prompted leniency.

Trump’s DOE secretary Acosta is moving to undo that kind of top-down, onerous mandate over racial disciplinary results so that dangerous students can be placed in more secure diversionary schools, where they are not so free to prey on, or kill, the innocent. Let’s hope those clinging to such failed, misguided policies can’t stall the common-sense reversal of Obama’s “disparate results” rules.

Now we have yet another workplace mass-murderer, with a criminal record, in Aurora, Illinois. After-action analysis must not downplay the potential role of yet another misguided Obama-era EEOC rule, the “ban-the-box” policy popular among the “racial justice” crowd. Since African-American men are disproportionately convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison, allowing employers to consider one’s criminal record—either by having a box to check or asking in an interview—will result in black men being turned down for jobs at a higher rate than white men.

“Disparate impact” (the term for when race-neutral policies have a greater negative affect on racial minorities) is seen by those to whom nothing but skin color matters as unjust by definition. Never mind that, just like the higher propensity of black students to misbehave (cue fill-in-the-blank cause), the higher percentage of African-American men in the prison system results not from white, racist deputies, prosecutors and juries but from the criminal proclivities of those arrested. Moreover, Obama’s Justice Dept harassed police over higher rates of traffic citations by black drivers, as if seeing a car violating the law tells anyone the race of the driver.

Employers have a “Catch 22” conundrum: have a consistent standard of not hiring felons for the protection of your assets, workplace and workers—and risk prosecutorial assault by “civil rights” litigation; or, hire without regard for past criminal behavior and be subject to lawsuits when bad guys do what bad guys end up doing. I suspect the current crop of Democratic 2020 presidential wannabes will all blame the gun.

A Powerlineblog.com post, “Phonies on Parade,” pointed out the hypocrisy of a few of those Democrat candidates: “Elizabeth Warran claimed to be an Indian. She isn’t. Kamala Harris claims to have been a ‘progressive prosecutor.’ She wasn’t. Amy Klobuchar holds herself out as ‘Minnesota Nice.’ She isn’t. Klobuchar’s mistreatment of staff members is legendary [then-Majority Leader Harry Reid had to ‘counsel’ her about it]. Kirsten Gillibrand posed as a moderate congresswoman…Once elected to the Senate, she abandoned moderation” to the point that few, if any, are to her left.

“Cory Booker is a fabulist. He used an imaginary friend — ‘T-Bone’— to tell self-serving stories in furtherance of his image. During his Spartacus moment, Booker bragged about risking expulsion from the Senate for violating the rule on publicly discussing classified documents. But the document in question had been declassified…and didn’t say what Booker claimed.” But Bernie Sanders is genuine (genuine socialist).

Take Joe Biden…please. He just went to the Munich Security Conference, and on German soil delivered a partisan stump speech to European leaders. In an apparent attempt to keep up the “blame America” shtick of his former boss, he rattled off complaints about President Trump’s immigration/border policies (ironically oblivious that he was also describing Obama’s policies), and called America “an embarrassment.” Frankly, I pretty much see Joe Biden as an embarrassment—just consider that he repeatedly recited a phony life story about being the first of his family to go to college, plagiarized from an Irish pol.

Which brings us to the ultimate in phoniness: the apparent hoax hate crime reported to police in Chicago by “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett. My first reaction to his fable—of being attacked and assaulted by MAGA-hat wearing white men, yelling racist and anti-gay insults and pouring an unknown liquid on him—was “yeah, right.” If you limited your news consumption to the liberal mainstream sources, you wouldn’t have a clue that many hate crimes—whether over race, anti-Muslim bigotry or whatever—have turned out to be fake.

High profile supposed sex assaults (University of Virginia fraternity, Duke lacrosse players, Yale “mattress girl,” Bret Kavanaugh, Herman Cain and other Republicans) have produced so many hoaxes that you would think entertainment, news media and Democrat presidential hopefuls would exercise caution. The “to good to verify” crowd, salivating for the “right” villains to be the perps—Trump supporters, Republicans, white men, Tea Party supporters—can’t wait for proven facts before spewing from the bottomless reservoir of anti-Trump hate and outrage. Genuine hate crimes against those on Trump’s side? Move along, nothing to report.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for heartfelt retractions from, most of all, Democrats whose entire careers now depend on demonizing “OrangeManBad” Trump and his base. I wonder, if we didn’t have fake hate crimes, would we have any hate crimes?