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Wednesday, September 7, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I N I O
N
John
Kass
American Voices
Welcome music lovers to the
21st Annual Sisters Folk Festival!
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
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To the Editor:
“Can’t we all get along?”
— Rodney King
This was almost 25 years ago. We are a
slow-moving people.
Stan Robson’s Nugget letter to the editor
about current racism last week caught my eye
when he said this: “I always tried to instill in
my folks that everyone was to be treated with
respect and dignity.” I’m assuming when you
say “my folks” that you are not talking about
your parents or “Americans” in general, but
whatever race/ethnicity you identify with —
which I feel drives the racism/division stake
yet a little deeper.
I randomly came across a Rubin Report
interview recently, with Larry Elder (radio
talk show host) about racism (BLM) who said
something that made complete sense to me. The
interviewer referred to Mr. Elder as black. Mr.
Elder went on to say that he also does not like
the term African-American. He was born and
raised in the U.S and has never been to Africa.
The host mentioned that he once referred to a
guest as an African-American, and the guest
corrected him by saying she was actually from
Jamaica (insert cricket noise here).
Let’s face it, there are so few people that
are 100 percent anything. I just learned you can
mail in saliva to find out your legit heritage.
Stay tuned — we might be related! I think if we
all did this, we might have more understand-
ing, empathy, grace, etc. for all humankind.
I guess in the end, if I were in charge we’d
just all be called “American,” or Pre-American
in some cases. My husband is from the Nez
Perce Tribe — so in the end “his folks” were
here first anyhow ... so there’s that.
Group hug from this American,
Becky Aylor
s
s
s
To The Editor:
The Robert B. Reich opinion column in the
August 31 Nugget was deplorable.
In his piece, he states that, “the best argu-
ment for a single-payer health care plan is the
See lEttErS on page 19
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Hillary Clinton’s defend-
ers keep insisting that there
was “no quid pro quo” in
having Mrs. Clinton, when
she was secretary of state,
meet privately with Clinton
Foundation donors — many
of them foreign donors —
seeking the favors of Mrs.
Clinton and the American
government.
The talking points
were established early on
by Clinton surrogate and
interim Democratic Party
Chair Donna Brazile on
ABC, after the Associated
Press broke its story about
Clinton Foundation mega-
bucks donors getting all that
happy face-time alone with
Hillary.
Brazile said: “So, you
know, this notion that, some-
how or another, someone
who is a supporter, someone
who is a donor, somebody
who’s an activist, saying, I
want access, I want to come
into a room and I want to
meet people, we often crimi-
nalize behavior that is nor-
mal. And it’s — I don’t — I
don’t see what the smoke
is.”
Only in Washington can
it be considered normal,
not criminal, for insiders to
use our government to get
rich.
There have been many
Republican officials who
stood up and said they can’t
vote for Trump for what
he’s done or said. So where
are the Democrats who are
standing up to say they can’t
support influence-peddling
and the Clintons? Their
silence indicates assent.
Maybe it’s that being a
Midwesterner, I can’t quite
appreciate the difference
between normal influence
peddling and abnormal
influence peddling.
But being from Chicago,
where corruption is the glue
that holds politics together
—and the bread and the
meat and the sport peppers
and the fries — I can tell
you what corruption does
not smell like.
It does not smell like a
smoking gun or a nonsmok-
ing gun. And it does not
speak Latin.
It smells like meat
a-cookin’, and that’s not a
language of words, but of
appetite. It smells sweet, and
there is no recipe. The rec-
ipe is understood, implied,
and if you dare ask for the
recipe, you are immediately
ostracized and kicked out of
the kitchen.
It doesn’t involve a
straight payoff. Everything
is layered. A deal goes to
Mr. X. Another deal goes to
Ms. Y. It’s all circular and
rather complicated, like the
Clintons parsing English,
and everything is under-
stood in the spaces between
the words.
When pundits moan
about “no smoking gun”
and “no quid pro quo,” they
must be referring to some
cartoon definition of cor-
ruption, as if it involved an
envelope stuffed with dead
presidents, handed over
to some grubby-fingered
hack in the backroom of a
greasy tavern with a tired
Kiefer Sutherland doing the
voice-over.
But people with govern-
ments and nations in the
palms of their hands don’t
deal that way.
The other day at break-
fast, I was talking about this
stupid, narrow Washington
definition of political cor-
ruption with a man who has
made it his life study.
“Say you’re in a meet-
ing with an elected official,
and you say, ‘I’ll give you
so much money if you give
me this favor and that favor,’
You know what happens
next?” asked the man wise
in the Chicago Way.
I knew, but I played
along: No, what happens?
“The first thing the poli-
tician will think to himself,
‘Why is he talking that way?
This son-of-a-b---- is wired
up,’” he said. “And no one
will ever talk to you ever
again.”
That’s why it’s depress-
ing to hear meat puppets
insist that there is no there,
there, with the Clinton
Foundation and Hillary,
because it’s already been
laid out.
The corruption was in the
selling of access to the high-
est reaches of the federal
government.
To someone who was
then a sitting secretary of
state who — as all the for-
eign tough guys with trea-
sure understood — was
already reaching for the
White House.
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Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.