Don's Tuesday column

                          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   9/29/2020

                             Merriment comes; what’s not funny

A sincere “welcome to this page” to our newest regular columnist, Liz Merry. Never shy of outspokenness, she earns my respect for her decades-long pursuit of…“merriment.” While not politically sympatico, I bow to the talent I lack: her and her partner, Mr. Standish’s, pursuit of humor—sarcastic, sardonic, pungent, ironic, incisive or otherwise. Years ago, we split our sides over her portrayal of Hillary Clinton as an Andrew Dice Clay-character; my attempts at anything beyond a wry smile or cheek-planted tongue fall short. Opine on, Liz.

There is, however, nothing funny about the Democrat left’s reaction to President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, 7^th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett. The news media have decided to sanitize and “mainstream” the left’s objections, but the fringe resonates with congressional Dems and their leadership.

First, a bigoted charge that her involvement in a Catholic/nondenominational religious group, “People of Praise,” was supposedly the basis for a dystopian, women-subjugated-by-men fiction, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” That from the side that 1) has never distanced itself from Bill Clinton’s sexual abuses (even refusing to admit them); 2) sheepishly looked away from prominent moneybag Democrats Jeffrey Epstein’s and Harvey Weinstein’s predations of (often underage) female victims; and 3) forgot that elected officials with scandals involving young women were mostly Democrats.

Apparently, rising above religious bigotry in electing Catholic President John Kennedy, makes it ok for Democrats to now boldly attack a Catholic judicial nominee, Ms. Barrett, for hewing to her faith and opposing abortion. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” despicable words from our Senator Diane Feinstein. Pro-abort-up-till-birth Dems Pelosi and Biden? Don’t dare question their faith.

There’s the unspoken bias against large families—based on some lunatic, climate-related aversion to children, particularly those born in the U.S.—using “scarce” resources out of proportion to our place in the world (say environmental radicals). The Barrett’s five natural children have been augmented by two Haitian-born adoptees; their relatively smaller Haitian carbon footprint will now rise to America’s shameful level.

It gets worse. Baseless offences: Adoptions may have skirted the rules; white, privileged Americans adopting dark-skinned children smacks of colonialism designed to say “look at us, we done helped the natives.” The abominable posts disappeared but the sentiment “lives loudly within” the demented left.

Democrats “can’t hep it” when their mental and emotional inclinations stem from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and amount to “if Trump says or does it, I’m agin’ it” and vice versa. How else to explain the nearly delusional, even hysterical, dismissal of a proven drug, HCQ which, with zinc and another drug, have beneficial results.

“Why is the death rate about 75 percent lower in many countries?” asked Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. It is irrefutable that in cases where HCQ is medically administered or prescribed upon first symptoms, even in an outpatient setting, hospitalizations and deaths drastically decline. Only institutional hyper-sensitivity to leftist messaging (loud beyond their numbers), in spite of the science, can explain it. From Wnd.com:

“(Orient’s) reference is to a country-based analysis updated Sept. 20 that shows a gap between countries that treat COVID-19 early or prophylactically with hydroxychloroquine and those that, like the U.S., discourage or prohibit its use. The answer to Orient's question can be found in a white paper published by the Economic Standard this month titled "Hydroxychloroquine and the Burden of Proof: An Urgent Call to Depoliticize Medicine in the COVID-19 Pandemic." Medicine politicized by the left=countless deaths.

Based on the experience of other countries, South Dakota, Florida and Indiana, we should see all emergency orders, mandates and economic restrictions lifted tomorrow, returning to regular, constitutional legislation. Continue self-selected isolation and mask use by vulnerable groups (that’s me). Local health and governing officials cannot deny that, for a county with a fraction of the state’s per capita cases and deaths, in a state that is about 26^th (“1” being worst) in the country, we’ve been under an unwarranted avalanche of paperwork, regulations and policies—despotic bureaucracy at its worst.

Oregon is about 46^th in those statistics but their Gov. Brown et al have imposed and expanded the same type of top-down micro-mandates; Washington, at #35, is likewise still under their Democrat Gov. Inslee’s rule, lacking any rationale for continuing the semi-lockdown of its economy and citizens. Maybe you missed the news that less than 10 percent of the so-called “Covid-19” deaths stemmed from the coronavirus alone. The rest, mostly in “Long Term Care,” had terminal conditions; they would have died, anyway.

The lessons should have been, after the first wave of infectious deaths: Most of us could live normally; school children are mostly immune and are not contagious. Use HCQ+ for early symptomatic cases; apply objective analysis of the effectiveness of the health mandates. Cancel emergencies; Trump will.

See “Schools aren’t spreading coronavirus,” at Joannejacobs.com: “Reopening schools isn’t spreading coronavirus, say public health experts” (Laura Meckler and Valerie Strauss, Washington Post).

“This Obama-Biden Administration Failure Killed More Americans (and Veterans!) Than COVID-19” by M. Margolis (pjmedia.com, 9/22), may push the bounds of cause and effect, but not by much. The Biden/media/Democrat complex are constantly updating Wu-flu numbers—209,177 as of Sunday. Biden’s Monday-morning-quarterbacking always includes things Trump already did, minus the criticism he heaped on Trump at the time; Democrats DeBlasio and Pelosi encouraged massive gatherings even into March.

In 2009, unlike they promised, the backlog of veterans’ benefits claims skyrocketed up to 900,000, with wait times up to 9 months. “According to an Inspector General report released in September 2015, more than 300,000 veterans died while waiting for care from Obama and Biden’s Department of Veterans Affairs. The problems at the VA were fixable and they failed to fix them.”