Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson      Red Bluff Daily News   7/16/2019

A little absurdity here and there

A few things have come and, seemingly, gone from our collective, media-driven awareness. Things like how the leftist political, media and cultural elites don’t seem to care much about jobs; or about citizenship (American or otherwise) or borders, without which there is no United States of America; or how winning a soccer championship brought whining and denigration of, not pride and gratitude for, our nation.

Or the unreality of thinking that wind and solar—or “renewable” energy in general (minus nuclear, of course)—could ever practically replace coal, oil and natural gas as reliable, scalable energy supplies. Or, how does a casual, glad-handing, ego-boosting social encounter between citizen Donald Trump and child predator and abuser Jeffrey Epstein warrant a guilt-by-association marathon of negative press; while the facts about the dozens of flights taken by President William Clinton on Epstein’s “Lolita Express”—where then-raped girls, now credible witnesses, provide detailed recollections of their abuse—elicit a yawning “nothing to see there” response?

Indeed, it was just reported that, rather than shunning the criminal pedophile Epstein, Hollywood and news media elites like Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos wined and dined with him and a British royal, just a year after his Florida prison term. “The next year, Mr. Epstein was photographed at a ‘billionaire’s dinner’ attended by tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. A page popped up on Harvard University’s website lauding his accomplishments, and superlative-filled news releases described his lofty ambitions as he dedicated $10 million to charitable causes.” (New York Times) We “normals” are revulsed.

Let’s also note another little-covered event wherein a foremost intellectual and author, Raymond Ibrahim, was to deliver a lecture to the Army War College (AWC) on his seminal book, “Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.” However, his lecture was canceled due to CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations)-induced hysteria “presenting Ibrahim—a native Arabic speaker of Egyptian/Middle Eastern descent—as a ‘racist’ and ‘white nationalist’ who is out to incite American soldiers to murder Muslims.” (Scott Johnson, Powerlineblog.com)

While insisting the lecture was only “postponed,” and that CAIR’s smear campaign had nothing to do with it, the AWC was clearly being disingenuous, as Ibrahim himself explained in “Terrorism-Linked CAIR forces U.S. Army War College to Capitulate on Raymond Ibrahim’s Islam Lecture”:

“If an ethnic Egyptian and native speaker of Arabic, with verifiable credentials, whose extended relatives continue to be persecuted because they are Christian, can be characterized by Islamist groups with terror links as a ‘racist’ and white nationalist’; and if, of all places, the U.S. Army War College, as opposed to the average ‘liberal’ college, can so easily capitulate to such patently deceptive tactics—the true motives of which are to keep the actual and troubling history between Islam and the West concealed from the military—know that the hour is late indeed.”

Remember the outrage a couple of months back when President Trump directed declassification by A.G. William Barr as part of a review of surveillance activities directed at the Trump campaign? In “Ex-CIA Officials Fume about Declassification Order, Ignoring Previous Leaks Of Secret Sources and Methods,” by the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross, we had a glaring example of the gross hypocrisy of these anti-Trump former intelligence community (IC) officials.

John Brennan, Peter Strzok and others were wailing, and hyping up fear and concern, as the President’s directive threatened to expose their illegal surveillance—spying—on Trump’s people. These very same officials had no qualms providing a multitude of leaks to news sources when the target was Donald Trump and the goal was to undermine his campaign and provide pretexts for impeachment.

We saw these shameless, unnamed “sources” filling pipelines to reporters, revealing sources, methods and investigative targets in the Trump-Russia probe. Now that the Mueller Report has debunked the “collusion” charges, and found no illegal obstruction (So, you didn’t steal the horse but you clearly obstructed justice trying to prove your innocence—hang him anyway, boys!) the perpetrators of illegal spying are terrified of exposure. Only leaks harming Trump are fine?

About Democrats not caring for (even hating) jobs, witness their obsession with minimum wages, in a recent bill to raise them to $15 over five years. The Congressional Budget Office, while not a perfect crystal ball of prediction, found that up to 3.7 million jobs would be lost, with a median estimate of 1.3 million. Their low end of roughly zero jobs lost is, of course, laughable in the face of economic laws, supply and demand and actual experience.

Seattle and New York City both had quantifiable losses of low wage jobs; the value of an entry level worker is far short of the higher wage. Employers resorted to cutting hours and shifts, and not hiring to avoid raising prices. Claims of benefits for millions, and families lifted out of poverty, are joy-juice inspired happy talk, since minimum wage workers are overwhelmingly young, under parents’ roofs, not married, with no kids. NYC’s mayor DeBlasio found the fix: make it harder to fire a now-unaffordable worker.

Ask a progressive what’s so special about America that we should enforce borders, refuse entry to illegals, deport them when found and insist on assimilation and citizenship to remain here. Trick question. They won’t answer because they don’t believe in any of it: not borders, physical boundaries, rule of immigration law, and certainly not American exceptionalism and selective immigration. A quick, to the point read is “Whose Side Are They On?” by J. Hinderaker: “Do they believe that the United States has a right to exist as a sovereign nation, or don’t they? For many Democrats, the answer is no.”

Finally, read “Why Wind and Solar Will Never Work,” with a link to Manhattan Institute and NWU scholar Mark Mills’ paper: “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking.” Says it all.