Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/12/2020

What you see from where you stand

Witness the divergence of opinion narratives; the assigning of blame, malintent and culpability. Note the mistaken, sloppy (misleading or deceptive) reporting. Realize that the errors and misrepresentations only lean to one side.

Headlines pronounced: “Department of Justice Drops Charges Against General Flynn.” Assuming Judge Sullivan accepts the irrefutable DOJ decision, the years-long prosecution—persecution if you favor Flynn and the expert analysis of Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz —now ceases, and becomes fodder for the legal, media and political commentariat.

The recorded remarks of ex-President Obama were a departure from the tradition that former presidents don’t criticize their replacements. We noted his factual misstatement that Flynn was guilty of “perjury,” and his record of dropping the prosecution of a general guilty of the same “crime” as Flynn. It’s an unprecedented, despicable descent into gross partisan warfare for the thinly-veiled, crass motive of helping his former vice president overcome obvious flaws—or a noble, fearless telling of truth to rally his party’s faithful for the historically necessary campaign to remove a sitting president that threatens our republic. What you see depends on where you stand.

Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd edited a recorded answer by Attorney General Bill Barr to support Todd’s assertion of Barr’s cynicism—and ignored Barr’s larger defense of the Flynn decision. Todd first clipped the CBS reporter’s question about it being “a big decision,” leaving out “What will [history] say about your decision making?”

Todd truncated the question into “When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?” Todd played Barr saying “Well, history’s written by the winners. So, it largely depends on who’s writing the history…” Todd left out “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.” NBC later corrected the “oversight” with a no apology.

The left-wing media, political and legal field—who constitute “the resistance” to every word, decision and action of Trump, however justifiable and legitimate—disagree vehemently. Yet, here’s the Irrefutable, Indisputable Truth: 1) Obama’s FBI had no legal prosecution under federal code against Flynn; his phone call to the Russian ambassador as Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser was legal and routine.

2) James Comey admitted to engaging in a “let’s just send a couple of guys over” ambush interview without revealing that questions and answers were legally accountable—they already had the transcript of the phone call containing no prosecutable statements by Flynn; 3) the agents’ “302 form” notes indicated their conclusion that Flynn was not deceptive; 4) Comey’s people changed those notes, took a discrepancy between the phone call and the interview answers and manufactured a charge of lying to the FBI;

5) Finally, they threatened to prosecute Flynn’s son, who would be driven to bankruptcy like his dad if Gen. Flynn didn’t plead guilty to lying. That threat was never revealed to the judge, who would have had reason to throw the case out due to misconduct. There’s much more but that’s enough.

CBS’s Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett about his Friday assertion that almost all workers (who lost their jobs due to the pandemic) “expect” to regain them within six months. That apparent “silver lining” (Hassett’s words) in the jobs report was dismissed by Brennan; she said workers “hoping” to go back to work is just “wishful thinking at this point,” adding “you don’t know that.”

So, what should be a sign of optimism for America’s economy—real unemployed workers saying that they “expect to go back to work in six months”—is somehow pie-in-the-sky and unrealistic to Brennan. And yet, predictions of doom-and-gloom, of rising cases and deaths, together with assertions of what will happen as the economy reopens, is treated as “delivered wisdom” no matter what failed track records the disease prognosticators may have.

“Experts predict” from their computer model crystal balls; they get reported and used to whip up anxiety, fear and public opinion for or against selective policies. Trump and Republican governors favor resuming economic activity by restoring citizens’ rights to open their businesses and travel about their cities and nation with caution—leftists scream “they want the coronavirus to kill people for filthy lucre’s sake,” money over lives and heath.

Democrats and their selected medical and health “experts” pronounce the inarguable (you on the right, just shut up!) wise course of continued lockdowns and home confinement until…Well, there is virtually no end to it, is there? Before we even restore pre-Wu-flu economic activity, they assume that such activity will kill more people—and “children.” Deaths and ill health from unemployment, despair and the starvation of millions as the world’s food supply falters? Pish posh. More Wu-flu cases next winter? Bring back mandated lockdowns and police state enforcement.

It's a bait and switch: the first stated goal was to not overwhelm hospitals, which were reconfigured for massive Wu-flu patients—flatten the curve! It worked too well as “elective surgeries” (the postponing of which can, in fact, have deadly consequences) and normal hospitalizations declined; staff are being laid off and hospitals face financial ruin. Our nation was never told that we were obeying the shutdown, stay-at-home “guidance” until it’s “safe.”

America remained “open” during the 1957-58 H2N2 (“Asian”) flu, today’s equivalent of 230,000 dead; or the 1968 H3N2 (“Hong Kong”) flu, about 170,000 dead in today’s terms.

Two of my daily “must read” sources are https://pjmedia.com and https://pjmedia.com/instapundit; also, President Trump’s twitter site, “twitter.com/realDonaldTrump”. Was Hunter Thompson onto something when he rejected “objective journalism” as “a pompous contradiction in terms”?