Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   11/01/2019

                   Word police, the truth, unfree press

A lot of folks find it ironic when words in common parlance, previously noncontroversial, are judged by “the word police,” I guess, to be off limits. This occurred to me while watching a middle-of-the-night infomercial for the late, great limits-pushing comedian George Carlin.

I see a “lesser evil” in permitting offensive language, if that expresses someone’s genuine thoughts and feelings, short of threats of violence or damage. While propriety and good manners dictate that we consider other’s sensibilities, people should still feel that there is somewhere, some venue where truly free expression is allowed. The easily-offended are free to find inoffensive sources.

Some city official was roundly condemned, and misunderstood, when he used the word “niggardly,” meaning stingy or cheap. Seems that its phonetic similarity to that other n-word sufficed to skip the step where people ask what someone really meant before jumping to the worst conclusion.

A sportscaster ran afoul of the “speech police” when he paid what he thought was a compliment to a women’s basketball team, saying they were effective, creative and dominant because they played “guerilla” -style on the court. Turns out that word sounds phonetically like “gorilla,” an ape, which to the quick-to-take-offense crowd means he was calling the African-American female athletes monkeys or something.

So, President Trump shocked the political class (again) by referring to the misguided, unfounded precedent- and rules-defying “impeachment inquiry” as a “lynching.” One conservative tweeter summarized the process: 1) Trump says something crazy; 2) His critics lose their minds; 3) Footage reveals that all his critics said the exact same crazy thing in the past in the exact same scenario; 4) Rinse and repeat. Cue Democrats calling the Bill Clinton impeachment, and the Benghazi hearings targeting Hillary Clinton, “lynchings.” See “things only Democrats can say.”

So many insightful, incisive observations have been made on the “kangaroo court” proceedings masquerading as an “impeachment inquiry”—no transcripts, public transparency, or cross examination of Democrat Schiff’s hand picked and coached “prosecution” witnesses, no rights for Republicans to even call their own witnesses, and so on—that it’s hard to be original. Moreover, Democrats are selectively “leaking” anything that they can interpret or spin into the worst conclusion about President Trump’s entirely lawful and proper foreign policy actions vis-à-vis Ukraine—while Republicans are powerless to dispute it publicly.

“Let’s be perfectly clear here. This means that Tuesday’s supposed bombshells from the testimony of William Taylor are meaningless. No one has any obligation to even believe that they’ve been reported accurately, much less to take their import up for discussion.” That’s from “The Gang That Couldn’t Impeach Straight,” by J.E. Dyer at Lidblog.com. The 1000-word picture has Speaker Pelosi and “Shifty” Schiff at a podium with the caption “The people be damned; we don’t like him so we’ll impeach him.”

To the anti-Trump jihadists, consider that the House of Representatives does or says nothing without a vote—neither the Speaker, majority or minority whip, nor committee heads have anything to say beyond their personal opinion unless the House or committee members have voted. That’s the Constitution’s way of enforcing “representative democracy”; they can speak for the district that voted for them, or convey what members have stated, by their votes.

The three prior impeachment processes all began with a vote of the whole House—authorizing committees to look into impeachable offenses by Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Clinton . A partisan, Obama-appointed and -promoted federal judge, Beryl Howell, cannot with her gavel give legitimacy to unilateral “impeachment inquiry” decisions by House Democrat Speaker Pelosi or committee heads.

The lessons from the failed hoax that brought about the toothless Mueller report, with no collusion or obstruction charges against Trump, have been intentionally forgotten: Assurance after promise after bold statement issued forth by those like Rep. Adam “Shifty” Schiff, who pathologically lie about what they could “prove” with “evidence” of Trump’s perfidy. Republicans were unable to fully refute the fallacious charges against Trump because the “proof” was a chimera of unknown and unknowable secrecy.

Completing the magician-worthy deception, the broadcast and cable news (excepting only Fox News), and the “beltway,” Washington Post/New York Times print news all simply accept the narratives of Trump-deranged Democrat opponents. So gullible and welcoming are those news agencies that contradictory, counterintuitive evidence from Trump supporters is simple dismissed and, if reported, done so with dismissive snark, even outright hostility.

You won’t find evidence of those lessons learned—let alone some humility over having failed their profession—from journalists. Have the Trump-hating columnists John Micek and Dick Polman ever shown on this page that they own up to having gotten the Trump/Russia collusion hoax wrong? “Democrats with bylines”—shielding the people from news that would put Democrats in a bad light—no longer fill the constitutional role of a free press, eschewing favoritism or party.

That model of free press died over the last 20 years by opposing President George W. Bush and all he did, then by becoming toadies and sycophants for their glorious “light bearer,” Barack H. Obama, and shifting into their current role in taking down, undoing and impeaching—or defeating in 2020—Donald J. Trump. Admission of that history might restore the role of a neutral press.

The late-breaking (in column timing) announcement by President Trump of the Special Forces-effected end of terrorist ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi resulted from 1) Trump negating the rules of engagement and layers of decision-making put in place by Obama—who is responsible for the failure to kill Baghdadi in 2011; 2) active coordination and permission, sought and achieved by Trump, between American military and other nations’ military in region; and 3) Trump’s greenlighting of the successful operation. Not one Democrat gave Trump unqualified praise. Sick.